OBJECTIVES To investigate whether intergroup contact in addition to education is more effective than education alone in reducing stigma of mental illness in adolescents. DESIGN A pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial compared education alone with education plus contact. Blocking was used to randomly stratify classes within schools to condition. Random allocation was concealed, generat...

BACKGROUND There are 600 million girls in low and middle income countries (LMICs), many of whom are at great risk for poor health and education. There is thus great need for programs that can effectively improve wellbeing for these girls. Although many interventions have been developed to address these issues, most focus on health and education without integrating attention to social and emotio...

Previous studies showed that heart period decreases during and recovers after an acute stress. We investigated if individual predispositions and emotional priming influence heart period recovery after a speech stress task. Psychometric scales and resting cardiac vagal tone were used to measure individual traits. The presentation of a sequence of either pleasant or unpleasant pictures, as emotio...

BACKGROUND Resilience, i.e., the ability to cope with stress and adversity, relies heavily on judging adaptively complex situations. Judging facial emotions is a complex process of daily living that is important for evaluating the affective context of uncertain situations, which could be related to the individual's level of resilience. We used a novel experimental paradigm to test the hypothesi...

Psychological distress is viewed as an emotional condition that involves negative views of the self, others and the environment and is characterized by unpleasant subjective states such as feeling tense, worried, worthless and irritable [3]. These subjective states can reduce the emotional resilience of individuals and impact on their ability to enjoy life and to cope with pain, disappointment ...