A randomised controlled feasibility trial for an educational school-based mental health intervention: study protocol

Background: With the burden of mental illness estimated to be costing the English economy alone around £22.5 billion a year [1], coupled with growing evidence that many mental disorders have their origins in adolescence, there is increasing pressure for schools to address the emotional well-being of their students, alongside the stigma and discrimination of mental illness. A number of prior educational interventions have been developed and evaluated for this purpose, but inconsistency of findings, reporting standards, and methodologies have led the majority of reviewers to conclude that the evidence for the efficacy of these programmes remains inconclusive. Methods/Design: A cluster randomised controlled trial design has been employed to enable a feasibility study of 'SchoolSpace', an intervention in 7 UK secondary schools addressing stigma of mental illness, mental health literacy, and promotion of mental health. A central aspect of the intervention involves students in the experimental condition interacting with a young person with lived experience of mental illness, a stigma reducing technique designed to facilitate students' engagement in the project. The primary outcome is the level of stigma related to mental illness. Secondary outcomes include mental health literacy, resilience to mental illness, and emotional well-being. Outcomes will be measured pre and post intervention, as well as at 6 month follow-up. Discussion: The proposed intervention presents the potential for increased engagement due to its combination of education and contact with a young person with lived experience of mental illness. Contact as a technique to reduce discrimination has been evaluated previously in research with adults, but has been employed in only a minority of research trials investigating the impact on youth. Prior to this study, the effect of contact on mental health literacy, resilience, and emotional well-being has not been evaluated to the authors' knowledge. If efficacious the intervention could provide a reliable and cost-effective method to reduce stigma in young people, whilst increasing mental health literacy, and emotional well-being. Trial registration: ISRCTN: ISRCTN0740602

The Sex Difference in Mental Rotation Test Scores May Not Reflect a Difference in Mental Rotation Ability

The largest reported sex difference in human cognition is found on mental rotation tests, which ask participants to compare pictures of three-dimensional objects and decide whether they depict the same or different objects. When the objects are the same, one can be rotated two- or three-dimensionally to match the other. Across cultures, males score up to one standard deviation higher than females on these tests. We administered two mental rotation tests to 123 participants and found that these higher scores likely do not reflect superiority in the process of mental rotation per se, but rather in other aspects of task performance. We found: (1) men are more likely than women to answer correctly when two objects are different, whereas women are more likely to answer incorrectly that they are the same; and (2) individual differences in confidence explain a considerable portion of the male advantage, but differences in spatial encoding ability do not. These results suggest more attention should be paid to individual differences in the various components of spatial ability and task performance, and have implications for evolutionary theories of sex differences in spatial cognition and for efforts to reduce sex differences in spatial ability, especially via training interventions

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relationship of male testosterone to components of mental rotatio