Breath-focused mindfulness and compassion training in parent-child dyads: a pilot intervention study

Background: Depression in children is a concerning societal issue, and can be associated with poor academic performance, school dropout and poor overall quality of life. Additionally, child depression is often associated with parallel stress and depression in parents.
Objective: This scenario highlights the urgent need for development and implementation of accessible and scalable solutions that may co-benefit child and parent mental well-being.
Methods: This pilot study introduced \"Cooperative Compassion\" (CoCo), a parent-child co-training digital application aimed at promoting mindfulness and compassion through brief, performance-adaptive sessions. A community sample of 24 parent-child dyads (children’s mean age: 9.5 years, 14 females/10 males, 11 Caucasian/5 Asian/7 mixed race/1 other race; parents’ mean age: 44.5 years, 20 females/4 males, 14 Caucasian/8 Asian/2 mixed race) of high average affluence socio-economic scores participated in the study. These parent-child dyads completed 3..., Participants. A total of 24 parent-child dyads participated in the current study. Dyads were recruited from local schools and university-affiliated pediatric clinics in the San Diego area through flyer advertisements and clinic referrals, respectively. Signed informed consent was obtained from the parents and signed assent was obtained from the children for study participation following the guidelines outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki. The study protocol was approved by the institutional review board of the University of California San Diego (protocol #180140). The study data were de-identified by taking out protected health information such as names, dates, and place of birth or anything else that is listed by Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) compliance. All the parent-child dyads were paid $250 for completing all assessments and digital training.
Also, all children and parents were right-handed and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Children wer..., , # Breath-focused mindfulness and compassion training in parent-child dyads: a pilot intervention study

## Description of the Data and file structure

The xlsx file contains the study data corresponding to (1) Demographics 24 Dyads (2) Training Feasibility (TF) survey
(3)

Spreadsheet (1) - Demographics 24 Dyads
Dyad_ID: ID starting with the prefix PJ assigned to each parent-child dyad

Child Age Bins: Children's age in years; 1 = 5-10 Years Old; 2 = 11-15 Years Old
Child Gender: Children's Gender, 1: male, 2: female
Child Race: Children's race, 1: Caucasian; 2: Black/African American; 3: Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; 4: Asian; 5: Native American; 6: More than one ethnicity; 7: Other
Child_Ethnicity:Children's Ethnicity, 1. Hispanic 2. Non Hispanic 3. Other

Parent Age Bins: Parents' age in years; 3 = 25-35 Years Old; 4 = 35-45 Years Old; 5 = 45-55 Years Old
Parent Gender: Parents' Gender, 1: male, 2: female
Parent Race: Parents' race, 1: Caucasian; 2: Black/African America..., Signed informed consent was obtained from the parents and signed assent was obtained from the children for study participation following the guidelines outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki. The study protocol was approved by the institutional review board of the University of California San Diego (protocol #180140). The study data were de-identified by taking out protected health information such as names, dates, and place of birth or anything else that is listed by Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) compliance., **Changes after May 12, 2025:** In this previous version, we found two major issues - (1) the duplications observed resulted from a batch processing script that erroneously plugged in repeat data, and (2) the subject IDs for pre and post data were misaligned when creating the final Dryad data excel file.

• Given this, we reprocessed all child neural data individually instead of as a batch process. In this iteration, all child neural data was successfully individually processed. Final data are now unique for each child participant, except child subject PJ24 data (that was one of the subjects flagged in PubPeer (https://pubpeer.com/publications/A3A0B6DC3D0240024423B217F3171E ) could not be processed as they did not have any meaningful on-task responses (child continuously held down response spacebar throughout task), hence had to be excluded.

• As part of our processing pipeline involves across-subject outlier cleaning as explained in the supplementary methods, all data values a...