Growth Mindset, Grit, and Mental Well-being Study: Anxiety & Depression

Mindset, Grit, and Adverse Experiences: Insights from Correlation Analysis

Although there are many researches that note the benefits of mindsets toward outcomes, achievement, and success, less work has focused on measuring the relationship between those constructs and adverse experiences. This study examined the relationship among mindset, grit, anxiety, and depression. Data were collected via survey from 103 participants, mainly undergraduate students from a public college consisting of approximately two-thirds Hispanic/Latino women.

Through a Pearson’s correlation analysis, we found that growth mindset was negatively related (p < .01) with general distress and depression (i.e., felt withdrawn from other people, felt tense, hopeless, and worthless) and positively related with grit (i.e., setbacks do not discourage me I do not give up easily). Furthermore, grit was positively related (p < .01) with not-depression (i.e., I felt really happy and felt like I had a lot of interesting things to do) but not significantly related to anxiety, distress, or depression. The study suggests that a growth mindset is a better suppressor of adverse feelings than grit.

Grit and Mindsets Influencing Mood and Anxiety to Predict Outcomes

Everyday life demands us to make decisions constantly. Those decisions are highly influenced by one’s own mindset and make us move forward or not. Dweck (2008) defined mindset as a mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and analyzes information to then influence individuals to orient their tendencies and reactions towards a particular way of understanding an experience or situation and guiding one toward corresponding actions and responses.

Dweck (2000) argued that there are two different ways in which intelligence may be classified: growth or fixed. Individuals with a fixed or entity mindset view intelligence as unchanging or stationary, whereas those with a growth or incremental mindset view intelligence as something that can develop or expand over time. Dweck and her colleagues indicated that mindsets about intelligence can predict objectives, beliefs about abilities and effort, and how individuals react to setbacks and then consequently predict outcomes. (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007)

People often infer something about fixed or growth mindset or about grit, even if they do not realize it. Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly (2007) incorporated the construct of grit and defined it as the inclination to maintain both effort and interest toward very long-term goals, showed that grit has two main traits, passion and perseverance, that may predict achievement in challenging decisions even over and beyond talent, that individuals high in grit do not swerve from their goals, even in the absence of positive feedback. A gritty person is a grittier person who has setbacks and does not give up easily.

Nevertheless, everyone, from time to time, has experienced the feeling of being discouraged or disappointed, even when they realize that they are doing their best or if they know they have a growth mindset and the grit needed to face difficult challenges or even simple setbacks. People often lose interest, motivation, and focus in ongoing task projects and divert such interest toward new ones without being able to avoid unwanted experiences or feelings of anxiety, distress, and depression.

Depressive symptoms presented with anxious distress, from mild to severe, are classified as unspecified depressive disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association [A.P.A.], 2013) that can lead to significant distress or deterioration in social, occupational, or other major areas of predominant functioning. A couple of such anxiety symptoms are feeling keyed up or tense and usually feeling restless and worried. The present study evaluated whether mindset and grit relate to specific anxiety and depression experiences. The range of those experiences and behaviors, from relatively more positive to relatively more negative, could lead people to work toward their goals as well as to experience anxiety and distress, even depression. Therefore, we hypothesize that:

Hypothesis 1: Individuals with a growth mindset experienced lower anxiety and distress than individuals with a fixed mindset.
Hypothesis 2: People with higher levels of grit will feel less anxious and have depressive symptoms than people with no grit.

Participants

The study used 103 participants who responded to an online survey. The study recorded the responses of 69 females and 34 males with an average age of 25.75 years. Seventy-three participants identified themselves as Hispanic/Latino, 13 as Asians/Pacific Islanders, five as White, and 12 as Mixed, Middle Eastern, Black/African American, or Native American. The household income of 28 participants was less than $19,999; for 27 participants was between $20,000 – $44,999; for 21 participants was between $45,000 – $69,999; and for 27 participants was $70,000 or more. Thirteen students had a G.P.A. in between of 1.6 – 2.5, 47 students in between of 2.6 – 3.5, 29 students in between of 3.6 – 4.0, and 14 participants reported no having a G.P.A. All responses were taken with full confidentiality and anonymously.

Procedure

The study was conducted during the Spring Semester of 2020 in an online-only form, mainly for undergraduate students from Cerritos College. Most of the students majoring in psychology were invited and asked to participate willingly by their professors. Students were encouraged to take the survey voluntarily and offered extra credit points as an incentive. No other compensation was offered. In addition, invitations to participate in the study were sent online to non-student adults in and out of campus as well. Some of these individuals voluntarily took the survey. Every participant was able to take the survey once only.

Materials

Mindset Scale (Dweck, 2006). An 8-item questionnaire where participants show how much they agree to the scale statements by using a Likert-type 5-point scale (1=strongly disagree to 5=strongly agree). The mindset scale includes statements such as, “I can learn new things, but I cannot really change my basic intelligence” and “I believe intelligence is something I cannot change very much.” Mindset Scale has two subscales, Growth Mindset and Fixed Mindset. In this study, Cronbach’s alpha for Growth Mindset was α = .676, whereas for Fixed Mindset, it was α = .739.

Grit Scale (Duckworth, 2007). A 10-item questionnaire aimed to predict achievement by using two traits: grit and self-control. Statements like, “I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest” and “New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones” are included in the Grit Scale questionnaire. Responses help to find out how passionate and persevering people see themselves to be. Participants had to indicate how much those statements apply to themselves using a Likert-type 5-point scale (1=very much like me to 5=Not like me at all). In this study, the Grit Scale had an internal reliability coefficient of α = .693.

Mini Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire (Mini-MASQ) (Casillas et al., L. A. (2000, May). This 26-item questionnaire includes a list of feelings, sensations, problems, and experiences that people sometimes have, focused on measuring anxiety, depression, and distress. Through a Likert-type 5-point scale (1=not at all to 5=Extremely), participants share their answers that best describe how much they have felt or experienced said things during the past week, including the day that they took the questionnaire. A lower score means lower symptom experience. This scale includes experiences like “Felt withdrawn from other people,” “Felt like I had a lot of interesting things to do,” and “Felt hopeless.” In this study, the Mini-MASQ subscales are anxiety, which had an internal reliability coefficient of α= .933, distress had an α= .95, depression had an α= .777, and not-depression had an α= .9.

Results

The goal of the study was to determine the type of relationship between the mindset and grit that a person has toward his or her mood and anxiety. A Pearson’s r correlation analysis was conducted to assess the relationships among growth mindset, grit, anxiety, fixed mindset, distress, depression, and not-depression for N = 103 participants. The age average for participants was 25.75 years, and more than two-thirds of the participants were women.

We found some important statistically significant relationships among the variables of the subscales. The complete correlation between pairs of variables is reported in Table 2, where significant correlations are noted in the table. Overall, there was a strong positive correlation between growth mindset and not-depression. That indicates that our hypotheses are supported by the results of the study and showed that growth mindset and gritty persons experience less depression and anxiety than fixed-minded and not gritty people. A significant negative correlation was found between a growth mindset and distress (r = -.309, p)

Reference:

1. Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement Across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention. Child Development, 78(1), 246-263.
2. Casillas, A., Clark, L. A., Goldsmith, H. H., Hulle, C. A. V., & Martinez, J. I. (2000). The Mini Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire (Mini-MASQ). Unpublished manuscript, University of Notre Dame.
3. Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087-1101.
4. Dweck, C. S. (2000). Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development. Psychology Press.
5. Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
6. Dweck, C. S. (2008). Mindsets and Math/Science Achievement. Carnegie Corporation of New York.
7. American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM-5).