Life On Mars #7
Working memory, personality distractions and the whole-school interventions that work (and those that don’t)
This fortnight’s Life On Mars looks at the role of working memory in teenage mental health and a training programme that may boost it, and at the potentially misleading role of personality. It assesses the whole-school interventions that achieve positive outcomes for teenagers, including those that reduce online bullying and regular smoking, and the interventions that current data show to be ineffective.
On the off-chance I haven’t mentioned it sufficiently, my book about teenagers was published last week. It’s reviewed in February’s The Critic magazine: ‘Teenagers offers some much-needed clarity to parents questioning how best to help their teenagers navigate an ever-more complicated world.’
If you have a copy of Teenagers, I’d be incredibly grateful if you could review it here. It’s quick and you don’t even need to write any words, if you don’t want to. Reviews get the algorithm working. If you don’t yet have a copy, you can get one here.
Training working memory may help to boost poor mental health
Study title: Relationship Between Stressful Life Events and Depression Among Adolescents: The Mediating Roles of Subcomponents of Executive Function (January 2025)
It’s no surprise that stressful life events are linked to teenage depression. Something bad happens; the experiencer feels bad for a while. But how this happens is more interesting: this study suggests that stressful life events may affect specific parts of how our brains work – making working memory worse, for example – potentially sparking depression.
Researchers in this study looked at stressful life events, so-called ‘executive function’ and depression in 213 Chinese teenagers. These researchers define executive function as ‘a set of cognitive processes that allow individuals to plan, regulate thoughts and actions, and eventually achieve their goals’.
The paper cites previous research showing links between trauma and later executive function deficits, and references a study showing improvements in the mental health of teenagers with symptoms of anxiety and depression who are trained to improve their executive function.
This new Chinese study tested the idea that stressful life events worsen executive function, which in turn makes depression more likely. Three areas of executive function were examined in the study:
Working memory, tested by whether participants could remember the position of a cartoon monkey king on the screen;
Inhibition, measured by how quickly participants were able to ignore one thing in favour of another – they were shown differently sized fruits on screen and asked to look only at how many of one particular type they saw, a challenge that’s thought to mirror what happens when people with depression have to handle difficult events/intrusive thoughts;
Shifting, tested by measuring how well participants were able to deal with rule changes in a card-sorting task.
Stressful life events were unsurprisingly linked to teenage depression, the researchers found. There were also links between stressful life events, depression and two types of executive function: working memory and inhibition (there were no significant links with shifting).
It may be that a stressful event – a house move, a parental split, exam failures or a death in the family – causes teenagers’ working memory to be less effective so that they fixate on their negative experiences, and less well able to ignore negative or intrusive thoughts in favour of more positive ones.
Takeaways: the earlier study referenced by these researchers shows that training teenagers with symptoms of anxiety or depression to improve their executive function may also improve their mental health, possibly because they learn (as a by-product) to inhibit negative thoughts in favour of more constructive ones.
The most interesting thing, for me, is that this training (called N-back memory training, for those who want to explore if further) has nothing on the surface that referenced mental health – it is a pure memory exercise. It may therefore allow teenagers who’ve experienced a lot of stress to train their brains to handle it in a way that doesn’t constantly give them a message that there is something wrong with their minds.
Personality factors predict teenage mental health, but perhaps not as much as researchers in this study say they do
Study title: Adolescents’ Personality and Sex, Age, Socioeconomic Status in Explaining Mental Health: A Representative Swedish National Study (March 2025)
How does personality inform mental health? This study used data on over 10,000 Swedish teenagers between the ages of fifteen and eighteen to look at links between mental health and the ‘Big Five’ personality traits. These are:
Openness – e.g. curiosity, creativity and being open to new experiences.
Conscientiousness – e.g. organisation, reliability and responsibility.
Extraversion – e.g. sociability and assertiveness.
Agreeableness – e.g. compassion, empathy and being co-operative.
Neuroticism – e.g. sensitivity to stress and tendency to feel negative emotions.
Headline findings were dramatic: personality differences explained around ten times more variance in mental health than did the teenagers’ sex, age or socioeconomic background. Teenagers are less likely to be anxious if they are more open, conscientious, agreeable and extravert, and if they are less neurotic. Neuroticism was the biggest predictor of poor mental health (but see below under ‘takeaways’ for problems with this finding). Teenage girls were more likely to have poor mental health; they were also much more likely than teenage boys to be neurotic.
(Somebody left a comment in a previous Life On Mars post asking whether family income was related to mental health outcomes. There are circumstances in which it may well be, but this study found little link between socioeconomic status and teenage mental health. That said, socioeconomic inequality is relatively low in Sweden so these findings may not apply elsewhere.)
Takeaways: the link between neuroticism and poor mental health could be explained by these being two different ways to describe the same set of experiences. The academic publisher Taylor & Francis describes neuroticism as ‘a personality trait that refers to an individual’s tendency to experience negative emotions such as anxiety, stress, anger and depression’.
To put it another way: if I have a tendency to experience stomach pain, I’m more likely to get stomach aches. This is not something that makes a great deal of sense in a scientific model.
Neuroticism is the strongest part of the researchers’ model – removing it would make the stated link between personality and mental health much weaker. This is a good thing, as far as our teenagers are concerned, as it gives them back their sense of control (even if we do need to recognise that neurotic teenagers tend to have worse mental health).
Whole-school approaches that aim to reduce online bullying and smoking probably work better than those intended to boost mental health
Study title: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Whole-School Interventions Promoting Mental Health and Preventing Risk Behaviours in Adolescence (January 2025)
Whole-school interventions cut across eight different areas: curriculum, socio-emotional environment, physical environment, school governance and leadership, school policies and resources, school and community partnerships, school health services, and government policies and resources. This review of studies pooled data to assess the role of whole-school interventions across fourteen possible outcomes that included mental health, substance use and bullying.
Previous reviews of studies hadn’t come to clear conclusions about this type of intervention, partly due to lack of underlying studies to inform them. The aim of this review was to include more recent research in order to update the evidence base and our resulting understanding.
The study’s authors found three areas of the fourteen investigated where whole-school interventions are clearly effective: reducing online bullying, reducing online aggression and reducing regular smoking among teenagers. It’s likely that this type of intervention works less well at reducing experimental or occasional smoking.
They were surprised not to find effectiveness in the other eleven outcomes, which included those related to mental health, and suggested that it may be that schools/research teams have failed to implement the underpinning framework properly. There’s another possibility, of course – that, as I’ve touched on in my book and in previous editions of Life On Mars, greater mental health awareness may lead to poorer outcomes for some teenagers when it leads them to introspect and to ruminate. If whole-school interventions increase this internal focus for some students, it may cause the lack of clear effectiveness that surprised the study’s researchers.
Takeaways: whole-school approaches to reduce online bullying, online aggression and regular smoking hold promise. Parents, teachers and school leaders should probably be more cautious about implementing whole-school mental health interventions.
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