ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Mental Health and Wellbeing in Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1613894
Mindfulness-Based Interventions and Student Well-Being: Can Digital Group Meetings Enhance App-Based Training?
Provisionally accepted
- University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany
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Abstract University students are experiencing more and more stress, which can negatively impact their mental health. Therefore, new ways are needed to address this issue. This study examined the effectiveness of an app-delivered mindfulness-based stress training and a possible interaction with additional group meetings within a university setting. To this end, a randomized mixed experimental design was used to assess an 8-weeks Mindfulness-Based Intervention (MBI) delivered via podcasts and supplemented by group meetings, either in video calls (VC) or a virtual reality (VR) environment. The intervention aimed to improve mental health, focusing on risk factors stress and loneliness as well as protective factors such as self-compassion and self-efficacy. Our results indicated partial overall effectiveness of the MBI, with significant reductions in stress experience and loneliness and increases in self-compassion, yet all at the facet level. Exploratory analyses revealed that group meetings enhanced mindfulness, which in turn contributed to stress reduction, but the relationships of VR immersion and stress reduction yielded mixed results. Therefore, our findings give novel insights into how the specific positive effects of the MBI might interact with digital group meetings, which could pave the way for further research with optimized intervention settings.
Keywords: mindfulness, stress reduction, virtual reality, group meetings, self-compassion, Loneliness
Received: 22 Apr 2025; Accepted: 08 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zinke, Ritz and Bunzeck. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Nikolai Zinke, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany
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