Online Socio-emotional Dyad Training for School Teachers' Well-being and Social Skills

Starting soon · Not applicable

Conditions studied: Intervention (Training) Condition, Waitlist Control Group

In brief

The Edu:Social School Study 2 is a randomized controlled trial designed to evaluate the effects of an 8-week socio-emotional, partner-based empathy-compassion Dyad training program (EmCo) compared with a mindfulness-based training (MBT) and a waitlist control group (WLC) in school teachers. The primary objective is to assess the efficacy of the adapted 8-week online EmCo Dyad training program across multiple domains of teacher functioning. Seven domains capture individual-level outcomes: (1) mental health, (2) resilience, (3) attention and cognitive processes, (4) social emotions, (5) stress coping and emotion regulation, (6) listening skills, and (7) voice-based emotional expression (DYVA). Two additional domains assess broader contextual outcomes: (8) classroom teaching and (9) organizational/school level outcomes, reflecting how individual-level changes may translate into perceived changes in the teaching and school context. To this end, participants will be randomized into one of three groups: (1) an 8-week EmCo Dyad intervention (EmCo), (2) an 8-week mindfulness-based training program (MBT), or (3) a waitlist control group (WLC) that will receive the EmCo intervention after completion of the initial post-test. Both interventions are delivered online via a dedicated study application to ensure scalability and accessibility. A second aim is to validate the Egocentric Social Network Analysis Paradigm (e-SNAP) as a measure of teachers' perceived social interactions and network structures. This study represents the first randomized controlled trial in teachers to examine whether changes in internal psychological processes are associated with perceived changes in the perception of the quality of interaction between school teachers and their students in the classroom as well as between school teachers and their colleagues in school. A third aim is to introduce and validate objective measures of emotional processing based on AI-based voice analysis in educational field research. Specifically, the study will evaluate two tasks using different parameters of AI-based emotional voice analysis: (a) the Teacher Voice Assessment (TEAVA), in which teachers' voices are recorded during a teaching-related task, and (b) the Dyad Voice Assessment (DYVA), conducted during the daily partner-based Dyad practice. In both tasks, non-semantic vocal features (e.g., pitch, loudness, speaking rate, intonation) and vocal emotional expressions (e.g., arousal, valence, dominance, and basic emotional categories) will be analyzed using audEERING devAIce software. No speech content will be transcribed or analyzed. A final aim is to investigate the cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying intervention-related changes. Based on prior research, the EmCo Dyad training is expected to enhance care- and affiliation-related motivational systems associated with positive affect, social emotions and connectedness, and prosocial behavior, while reducing loneliness, social stress, and other forms of psychological vulnerability. In contrast, mindfulness-based training is expected to primarily strengthen attention- and thought-related processes, including present-moment awareness, calming the mind and executive attentional control. These mechanisms are expected to contribute to improvements in mental health and overall well-being across both intervention groups.

Key facts

Study ID: NCT07637409
Run by: Max Planck Social Neuroscience Lab
People needed: 900
Starts: 2026-06-01
Expected to finish: 2027-04-03
Last updated by the study team: 2026-06-09

Who can join

Age: 18 and older, up to 68. Sex: any. Healthy volunteers: accepted.

You may qualify if…

Between 18- and 68-years old.
Currently working as a school teacher in Germany or Austria; grades 1-12; primary, secondary, special needs, and vocational schools.
Proficient in German.
Informed consent.
No symptoms of psychiatric disease within the past two years; healthy population, non-clinical population.
Stable internet access and necessary technical equipment (mobile phone with internet access).
No regular contemplative practice (≤ 50 hours total within the past six months).

You may not qualify if…

Insufficient German proficiency.
Lack of stable internet access or required devices (mobile phone with internet access).
No informed consent.
Not currently working as a school teacher.
Regular contemplative practice (> 50 hours in the past six months (e.g., dyad, mindfulness, compassion-based practices).
Current psychiatric diagnosis or therapy, or reaching screening cutoffs on:
Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9; Martin et al., 2006; Löwe et al., 2004; Cutoff ≥ 20; or endorsing suicidality on the item 9),
Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7; Löwe et al., 2007; Spitzer et al., 2006; Cutoff ≥ 15),
Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20; Bagby et al., 1994; Ritz \& Kannapin, 2000; Cutoff ≥ 61)
In addition, participants will complete the Standardized Assessment of Personality - Abbreviated Scale (SAPAS; Moran et al., 2003) which is not used as quantitative exclusion criteria in step 3, but provides additional information to support the phone call with one of the teachers, as part of the screening process.

Full record on ClinicalTrials.gov

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