“Hero” a home-based program for promoting prosocial behaviors and positive emotions in adolescents during COVID-19 pandemic

BELÉN MESURADO; CLAUDIA E. VANNEY

Congreso; 2021 Biennial meeting of Society for Research in Child Development; 2021

Society for Research in Child Development

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a strong impact throughout the world modifying our everyday social life, and particularly, family and social interactions. Governments have reacted differently to the pandemic. Several Latin American countries have decreed mandatory preventive isolation to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, especially due to the scarce infrastructure to face a health emergency. Currently, Argentina has gone through more than 6 months of mandatory preventive isolation, which included border closures, suspension of face-to-face classes in schools, restriction or closure of public places, restrictions or prohibition of family or social gatherings. This unusual and prolonged social context in Latin America resulted in a high level of psychological distress. Recent studies have indicated that 40% of adolescents are afraid of getting the virus, 35% of adolescents believe that the quarantine has an emotional impact on their self, between 20 and 30% of the adolescents reported moderate levels of anxiety, while 37% reported symptoms of depression. Due to the large extension of the quarantine in Argentina, they have become suitable places where to implement interventions based on positive technology in order to mitigate psychological distress and to improve well-being. Mesurado et. al. (2019) developed an online program, called Hero, which aims to promote socio-emotional variables, such as prosocial behavior and positive emotions. Hero is a short self-administrated program guided by a Sensei. It is offered to adolescents as an adventure trip in which they will visit 5 islands, which set up the intervention modules. The 5 intervention sessions add in videos and different activities (e.g. a gratitude book, exercises to promote emotion recognitions, etc.). The aim of the current study is to explore the effectiveness of Hero Program among adolescents from Argentina in the promotion of positive emotions and prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. We will also explore the indirect effect of the program on prosocial behavior through positive emotions, using gender and age as control variables. To access the participants, we contacted educational institutions interested in the program. Four institutions were included in the study. We used a cluster randomized trial design. The participants included in the control group were put in a waiting list to participate in the Hero program once the post-test evaluation was completed. Both the control and intervention groups filled up two evaluations: pre-test and post-test. The final sample includes 200 participants (50% control group) of 12 to 15 years old. We explored the direct and the indirect effect of the Hero interventions on change scores of prosocial behavior using the Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) proposed by Valente and MacKinnon (2017). The preliminary results have shown a positive impact of the Hero program on both positive emotions and prosocial behaviors toward strangers, friend, and family. Furthermore, the results suggested that Hero intervention had an indirect effect to prosociality through positive emotions See Table 2. For the final paper we will also incorporate testimonies of the adolescents about how the Hero program helped them to overcome the challenges of the situation of social isolation.