Compassionate Brain: Evaluation of a psychoeducational workshop program for middle school students

INTERVENTION: The Compassionate Brain Program is a novel psycho‐educational workshop series that has been developed for middle school students. This study is a controlled trial seeking to evaluate the effectiveness of this program and to also better understand the relationships between emotional regulation, perfectionism, low mood, anxiety, stress and self‐compassion in an adolescent population. The Compassionate Brain program has been developed within a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Self‐Compassion framework. The program seeks to provide psychoeducation about thoughts, emotions, and behavior as well as encourage the development of skills such as mindfulness, self‐compassion and helping thinking styles. Content will be interactive, including experiential exercises, role plays, and mindfulness practice. The program will be delivered by a registered clinical psychologist face‐to‐face and involve both lectures and small group work. School teachers will be involved in assisting the small group work. The intervention will be delivered over a total of 8 sessions for the intervention group. The duration of each session will be approximately one hour, conducted at the school the students are currently attending. Dependent on school timetabling, the sessions will be run either once a week or once a fortnight. Thus total duration of the intervention will be 8‐16 weeks. A series of questionnaires will be administered to measure outcomes prior to the program starting, at the end of the program and a follow‐up set of questionnaires will be administered approximately 3‐4months later post‐program completion. The primary outcomes to be measured are difficulties in emotional regulation, perfectionism, low mood, stress, and anxiety. Intervention adherence will also be assessed by recording attendance of students during each session. CONDITION: Emotional Regulation Difficulties Negative Affect Perfectionism PRIMARY OUTCOME: Negative Affect ; Scale: the 21‐item Depression, Anxiety Stress Scales, (DASS‐21‐Y; Szabo, unpublished scale). ; Perfectionism ; Scale: the 23‐item Almost Perfect Scale (APC; Slaney, Mobley, Trippi, Ashby & Johnson, 1996). The primary objective of the project is to evaluate the efficacy of the Compassionate Brain program in relation to difficulties in emotional regulation. ; Scale: the 18‐item short version of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS‐18; Victor & Klonsky, 2016). SECONDARY OUTCOME: Open‐ended qualitative reports of how helpful or unhelpful students found the program Self‐compassion ; Scale: Self‐compassion Short Scale (Raes, Pommier, Neff & Van Gucht, 2011). INCLUSION CRITERIA: Middle school students