Assessing and Enhancing Emotional Competence for Well-Being (ECoWeB) in the Young: A principled, evidence-based, mobile-health approach to prevent mental disorders and promote mental well-being

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Although there are effective mental well-being promotion and mental disorder prevention interventions for young people, there is a need for more robust evidence on resilience factors, for more effective interventions, and for approaches that can be scalable and accessible at a population level. To tackle these challenges and move beyond the state-of-the-art, ECoWeB uniquely integrates three multidisciplinary approaches: (a) For the first time to our knowledge, we will systematically use an established theoretical model of normal emotional functioning (Emotional Competence Process) to guide the identification and targeting of mechanisms robustly implicated in well-being and psychopathology in young people; (b) A personalized medicine approach: systematic assessment of personal Emotional Competence (EC) profiles is used to select targeted interventions to promote well-being: (c) Mobile application delivery to target scalability, accessibility and acceptability in young people. Our aim is to improve mental health promotion by developing, evaluating, and disseminating a comprehensive mobile app to assess deficits in three major components of EC (production, regulation, knowledge) and to selectively augment pertinent EC abilities in adolescents and young adults. It is hypothesized that the targeted interventions, based on state-of-the-art assessment, will efficiently increase resilience toward adversity, promote mental well-being, and act as primary prevention for mental disorders. The EC intervention will be tested in cohort multiple randomized trials with young people from many European countries against a usual care control and an established, non-personalized socio-emotional learning digital intervention. Building directly from a fundamental understanding of emotion in combination with a personalized approach and leading edge digital technology is a novel and innovative approach, with potential to deliver a breakthrough in effective prevention of mental disorder.