Stress Mindset: Evolution, Current Developments, and Future Directions

This paper presents a systematic literature review of the works published on stress mindset during the foundational years before it experienced rapid growth, followed by a bibliometric analysis of all works published to date. Specifically, it reviews the temporal development of research on stress mindset, including the most dominant authors, primary scholarly sources, and top-cited works. Second, it lays the groundwork for the intellectual and social structures of stress mindset using co-citation and collaboration network analyses. Third, it employs keyword co-occurrence analysis to identify thematic clusters and topics that have been trending over the past 10 years. Finally, it uses thematic mapping to comment on how the various themes could be categorized based on their relevance and development in this important research domain. Overall, we have found that stress mindset in all its forms—as an antecedent, boundary condition, mechanism, and outcome—constitutes a fertile research area now witnessing exponential growth and rapidly transforming into an interdisciplinary construct. As such, this work promises to guide researchers interested in stress to make judicious choices when allocating their resources and efforts in pursuit of future knowledge.