Edu:Social School Study2: Promoting Well-being and Socio-emotional Skills for School Teachers With App-based Mindfulness and Dyadic Empathy-compassion Trainings.

The teaching profession is widely recognized as highly demanding, and teachers report elevated rates of stress and burnout. If left unaddressed, burnout adversely affects teachers' health, job performance, teaching quality, and school turnover rates. Moreover, teacher burnout has important consequences for students. Teachers' emotional exhaustion has been shown to negatively affect students' academic achievement and self-concept in Germany. Given teachers' pivotal role in shaping children's socio-emotional development, addressing psychological vulnerability-including stress, depression, anxiety, loneliness, and exhaustion-is essential. Strengthening resilience enables teachers to maintain well-being and effective classroom functioning in the face of adversity by supporting adaptive stress management. In addition, strong interpersonal skills such as empathy, compassion and high-quality listening play an important role in the teacher-student communication. Addressing psychological vulnerability and strengthening resilience and social skills, is essential not only for teacher well-being but also for the functioning of educational systems broadly.

In recent years, mindfulness-based interventions focusing on individual mental practices have been expanded to include partner-based social practices (Dyads), which specifically target social skills such as empathy, (self-)compassion, social connectedness and different types of listening. However, dyadic interventions, that is daily mental practices done with a partner, have not yet been systematically investigated in educational settings. Existing evidence suggests that contemplative Dyads may be more effective than solitary mindfulness practices in reducing loneliness and social stress, enhancing social connection, and strengthening resilience. Moreover, dyadic practices appear to engage mechanisms that differ from those underlying traditional mindfulness-based interventions.

Empathy, (self-)compassion, and high-quality listening are core socio-emotional skills in school contexts. However, empathy may lead to empathic distress when individuals are repeatedly exposed to others' suffering, whereas compassion is considered more protective due to its association with positive affect and prosocial motivation. To address this distinction, the Edu:Social School Study 2 implements an empathy-compassion Dyad training program (EmCo), which trains participants in empathic listening and emotion regulation during the first four weeks, followed by (self-)compassion and compassionate listening during the subsequent four weeks.

The EmCo program builds on the Affect Dyad developed in the ReSource project and the online Dyad 10-week intervention program with weekly online coachings and daily app-based Dyads implemented in the CovSocial project. These two large-scale mental training studies, have shown that different types of practices produce distinct effects on psychological and biological outcomes. The ReSource project, a 9-month longitudinal study using behavioral, hormonal, autonomic and neuroimaging (fMRI) measures, compared three training modules, including a mindfulness-based "Presence" module, a socio-affective "Affect" module (including the Affect Dyad) and a socio-cognitive "Perspective" module, and demonstrated that training content differentially affects mind, behavior and brain. Building on this work, the CovSocial project implemented a 10-week fully online design comparing a low-dose purely online socio-emotional Dyad training with a mindfulness-based active control training group. Results showed both shared and distinct effects: while both interventions improved mental health outcomes such as depression, anxiety, emotion regulation, and compassion, the Dyad training showed stronger effects on resilience, positivity bias, social connectedness, and reductions in loneliness and social stress.

Further, mediation analyses suggest that individual mindfulness practices and partner-based Dyadic practices influence well-being through partly distinct psychological mechanisms, whereas care-based motivational processes could account for Dyad-practice effects and thought-related process for mindfulness-practice effects.