{"doi":"10.1016/j.procs.2022.09.084","title":"Efficacy and acceptability of digital stress management micro-interventions","abstract":"Tremendous interest exists in the use of brief digital “micro-interventions” for online and mobile intervention. Most digital micro-interventions, however, lack a strong theoretical or empirical basis and have not demonstrated efficacy and acceptability. We developed a suite of brief digital stress management micro-interventions based on theory and empirical evidence and tested the efficacy and acceptability of these micro-interventions in managing stress, mood, and perseverative cognition. Participants were 1,050 US adults (ages 35-65) in good health who received digital micro-intervention content (or comparison content) and then completed post-intervention measures and acceptability ratings. We created 16 brief (<2 min) micro-interventions across four therapeutic domains (relaxation, response modulation, positive experiences, and resource buffers) and a brief active comparison activity. We also created one multi-component micro-intervention (∼20 min) that contained elements of all four domains, and a time-matched active comparison activity. A subset (n=850) of participants received one of the 16 brief micro-interventions or a brief comparator; the remainder (n=200) received either the longer multi-component micro-intervention or the time-matched active comparator task. All micro-intervention stress management content reduced acute stress, negative mood, and perseverative cognitions. For all outcomes, the multi-component intervention showed the strongest effects. Active comparator tasks were more weakly associated with outcomes (except that brief distraction was highly effective at reducing perseverative cognitions). Micro-intervention acceptability was generally high across multiple dimensions. These data demonstrate that a diverse set of 16 brief digital micro-interventions comparison activity were efficacious, and an integrative multi-component micro-intervention was more efficacious. Such micro-interventions hold great potential for scalable digital implementation, including “just-in-time” intervention in response to acute risk states.","journal":"Procedia Computer Science","year":2022,"id":296943,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":15,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9522,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":767231,"name":"Matthew J. Zawadzki","orcid":"0000-0001-6968-084X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":866491,"name":"Frank T. Materia","orcid":"0000-0002-8015-1743","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":984939,"name":"Ann C. White","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":331945,"name":"Joshua M. Smyth","orcid":"0000-0002-0904-5390","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":860731,"name":"Jillian A. Johnson","orcid":"0000-0003-1379-2150","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":56,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:31:21.257700Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}