Efficacy of a stepped-care approach for school-age children with mild to moderate ADHD (ESCAschool-moderate): an adaptive intervention study including a randomized controlled trial.

Eustress is a positive stress response that emerges from transactions between an individual and their immediate environment (cf. Lazarus & Folkman, , ). Individuals experience eustress in various ways that can be cognitive (e.g., insightful appraisals, meaning), affective (e.g., fulfilment, excitement), and behavioral (e.g., coping, engagement), together impacting on the individual’s wellbeing, productivity, learning, and personal growth (Kloidt & Barsalou, ; Lazarus & Folkman, ; Simmons & Nelson, ). Eustress emerges from situations that are appraised as challenging, with most research to-date focusing on professional settings in corporations (Cavanaugh et al., ), social services (Rodríguez et al., ), and universities (Gibbons et al., ; O’Sullivan, ). By focusing on positive experiences in challenging situations (e.g., being excited about giving a public speech), eustress remains conceptually distinct from wellbeing, which typically occurs in non-challenging settings (e.g., being excited about relaxing at home). Nevertheless, the two constructs appear closely related (Kloidt & Barsalou, ). Although eustress has often been conceptualized as a transactional process (cf. Lazarus & Folkman, ), relatively little research has addressed how individuals experience eustress across different areas of life and the underlying processes related to it. Understanding the processes that influence positive experiences of stress in real-world settings is crucial to inform contextualized interventions for pivoting from distress to eustress, such as interventions for producing stress optimization (Crum et al., ). The primary aim of this study was therefore to measure how UK adults experience eustress and its underlying processes across real-life challenging situations. We employed the Situated Assessment Method (SAM; Dutriaux et al., ) to quantify self-reported eustress across individuals and challenging situations, and to identify key processes, such as successful outcomes, fulfilment, and positive affect, that influence it. To understand a behavior in real-world situations, SAM proposes that researchers should measure the behavior in situations where it occurs, instead of ignoring situations or abstracting over them to simply measure traits. The few eustress instruments that exist typically adopt an approach, using decontextualized items to measure the trait of eustress, such as “In general, how often do you feel motivated by your stress?” (O’Sullivan, ). Certainly, these instruments add to our understanding of eustress as a theoretical construct and its general distribution across populations. Answering these items, however, can be difficult because individuals must abstract over situations and establish general impressions of how much they agree with general statements about eustress. Individuals may instead rely on intuitive theories and/or the availability heuristic (sampling a few salient situations) to arrive at their judgment, potentially leading to unrepresentative or inaccurate responses (Ajzen, ; Gelman & Legare, ; Tversky & Kahneman, ).