From growth mindset to social-emotional skills in early and mid-adolescence: A educational-cultural examination of an integrated mind-body-behavior framework

Background Social-emotional learning (SEL) is a core educational goal, yet little is known about how adolescents’ cognitive beliefs, body-related self-perceptions, and everyday health behavior jointly relate to social-emotional skills across diverse cultural contexts and school stages. Objective Based on mindset theory and self-regulation perspectives, we examined an integrated Mind-Body-Behavior framework in which growth mindset, positive body image, and health behavior show a theoretically specified pattern of associated with adolescents’ social-emotional skills. Sample Participants were 62,105 adolescents from 15 regions where data were drawn from the OECD 2023 Study on Social and Emotional Skills. Methods A two-stage quantitative design combined structural equation modeling and machine learning. Results Growth mindset was associated with social-emotional skills both directly and indirectly associations via body image and health behavior. The direct association was substantially stronger than the combined indirect associations, indicating partial rather than complete support for the full proposed pattern. Scalar invariance across the seven clusters was not supported, so cluster-level comparisons were treated as descriptive. Associations differed between cohorts: the association between growth mindset and body image was stronger in the younger cohort, whereas the association between health behavior and social-emotional skills was stronger in the older cohort. Conclusions The study contributes an integrated view of how beliefs, body-related self-perception, and health behavior relate to social-emotional skills. The framework shows that cognitive, body-related, and behavioral domains each relate to adolescents’ social-emotional skills and that these relations change between school stages.