Why Improv Theater May Be the Social Skill Booster Anxious Teens Need

Signing teenagers up for improv comedy classes might sound like an unusual prescription for improving their mental health and social development, but a new controlled study suggests it could be a promising school-based tool for building specific interpersonal skills in students who are already emotionally struggling. Researchers tested three different school-based activities on hundreds of adolescents and found that all three appeared to shield anxious teens from a drop in self-efficacy, meaning their confidence in handling challenges, and from a rise in emotional and behavioral difficulties. Only improvisation theater, though, produced gains in two interpersonal skills: cognitive empathy and a collaborative mindset. Those gains showed up regardless of students’ anxiety levels going in.

Published in the journal Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy, the research followed 292 students from vocational high schools in Geneva, Switzerland, over a nine-week program. Students were placed into one of four groups: improvisation theater, mindfulness meditation, social and emotional board games, or a computer-based office skills course that served as the comparison group. Researchers measured a range of social and emotional abilities before and after the program to see what changed, and for whom.

Benefits like these did not spread evenly across the group. They landed on specific students and, in one case, through a specific activity, cutting against the assumption that social-emotional learning programs work the same way for every teenager.

Anxiety Decided Who Benefited

One of the study’s most telling findings had nothing to do with which activity was “best” overall. It had to do with which students were at risk in the first place.

Students were screened for anxiety before the program began, and roughly a third of all participants scored in the moderate-to-high range. For those students, something concerning happened in the control group: their emotional and behavioral difficulties worsened, and their self-efficacy, their confidence in handling challenges, declined over the nine weeks. Teenagers in the same anxiety range who were assigned to any of the three activities, by contrast, stayed stable. They did not improve dramatically, but they did not slide backward either.

Researchers describe this as a “protective effect.” For students who were not anxious to begin with, none of the activities produced significant changes in either direction, meaning the protective benefits documented here were concentrated among the teens who were already struggling emotionally. Structured social-emotional activities may function less as broad enrichment for everyone and more as a safety net for the students who need one most.

Running in fall 2021, the program took place during a period still heavily shaped by pandemic-era social restrictions. Prior research has documented a broad decline in adolescent mental health during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and the worsening seen among anxious teens in the control group fits that wider pattern, though the study did not test whether pandemic conditions were behind the control group’s decline. During a stretch when so many young people were losing ground, even holding steady counts for something.

What Improv Theater Offered That Others Could Not

Beyond the shared protective benefits for anxious students, improvisation theater produced two gains that neither mindfulness nor board games matched: a better ability to understand another person’s point of view, and a stronger willingness to work with others. Both are foundational social skills, and both showed up across improv participants no matter how anxious those students were going in.

That edge makes sense given what improv actually demands. Students must construct scenes spontaneously with partners, building on each other’s ideas in real time without a script. Every moment requires reading a partner’s intentions, accepting their contributions, and offering something that keeps the scene alive. There is no option to mentally check out and still take part. The researchers suggest that this continuous, socially intensive engagement could help explain improv’s advantage over more structured or inward-facing formats.

Improvisation theater was also the most popular activity among students, with an average enjoyment score of 74 out of 100. Board games followed at 70, mindfulness at 57, and the control computer course at 55. Whether higher enjoyment contributed to the stronger outcomes is something the researchers could not fully separate from the activity itself.

How the Improv Theater Study Worked

Researchers recruited 394 students across three vocational high schools in Geneva, drawing from a population with a higher-than-average rate of socioeconomic vulnerability. Nearly half of participants came from households where parents worked in manual labor, and a notable share reported parental unemployment or foster care placement. After excluding students with very high absenteeism or insufficient French fluency to complete the questionnaires, the final sample comprised 292 students aged 15 to 23, though most were 16 or 17.

Entire classes, rather than individual students, were assigned to activity groups, a design choice intended to prevent students in the same class from receiving different programs. Each session ran 90 minutes per week across nine weeks, and all three programs were delivered by trained instructors. The comparison group took a structured computer course in office software, designed to match the format of the other activities without including any social or emotional learning content.

Social and emotional skills were measured using self-report questionnaires and a task assessing students’ ability to recognize emotions, both before and after the nine-week period. Anxiety was measured at the start to examine whether it influenced students’ responses to each activity.

Where Mindfulness and Board Games Fell Short

Researchers originally predicted that mindfulness would be particularly effective at building inward-focused skills like emotion regulation, and that the board games would yield specific gains in recognizing and handling feelings. Neither prediction fully held up.

Mindfulness did not produce measurable improvements in those inward skills compared to the control group. Board games did not lead to the emotion-focused gains researchers expected. Both activities shared in the protective effect for anxious teens, but neither generated the specific skill-building the team had anticipated. One possible explanation is that nine weeks may not be long enough for some of these more subtle changes to emerge, particularly in older adolescents. Prior research has also found that mindfulness programs in schools tend to produce modest and inconsistent results when tested against an active, structured comparison group, which is exactly what this study used.

Data from this study, 292 vocational high school students in Geneva observed over nine weeks, point to a conclusion that is both modest and meaningful. The three structured activities tested here appeared to help vulnerable teens hold steady through a difficult developmental period. And for schools looking to go further, improvisation theater stands apart: within these same students and conditions, it appears to have grown two interpersonal skills that the other activities did not.

Disclaimer: This article summarizes findings from a single peer-reviewed study and is intended for general informational purposes only. It is not medical, psychological, or educational advice. The two interpersonal skill gains linked to improv theater were reported by the authors as trend-level effects, and results from one study of 292 vocational high school students in Geneva may not apply to other groups or settings. Anyone making decisions about school programs or a teen’s mental health should consult a qualified professional.

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