A short, animated storytelling video to boost psychological capital

Short, animated storytelling (SAS) videos have shown promise for scaling and engaging audiences with preventive public health messages. This dataset contains study data from a 4-arm, parallel, online randomized controlled trial aimed at measuring the effect of SAS video content on immediate and medium-term psychological capital (PsyCap) and two related constructs, gratitude and happiness.

Data was from 8,612 US adults, enrolled online via Prolific Academic, from June-July 2024. Participants were randomly assigned to watch either a PsyCap-SAS video or an SAS attention placebo control video (APC-SAS), followed by PsyCap, gratitude and happiness surveys. The remaining arms were Do-nothing control arms, the first exposed to the surveys at Timepoint 1 (T1) and the second remaining un-exposed until Timepoint 2 (T2) two weeks later. The primary outcome was PsyCap (measured immediately at T1 and in the medium-term, at T2). Secondary outcomes were gratitude and happiness (immediate and medium-term) as well as voluntary engagement with the intervention video.

PsyCap was measured with the CPC-12R scale (Compound Psychological Capital Scale - 12 Revised); gratitude was measured with the GQ-6 (The Gratitude Questionnaire – Six Item Form); and happiness was measured with a self-rated scale from 0-10.