"I Am Not Struggling Alone": communicating support through peer mutual aid to reduce academic stress transmission and emotional contagion in large university classes.

Large university classes are important communication environments in which students observe, interpret, and exchange stress-related information. Academic stress may therefore spread not only through individual experience but also through interpersonal communication and social interpretation,and shared meaning-making processes. How students communicate about academic challenges, interpret peers' stress-related cues, and construct shared understandings of academic pressure may therefore influence whether stress becomes socially amplified or collectively managed. This study examined whether a brief peer mutual-aid routine was associated with lower academic stress transmission and negative emotional contagion by making academic struggle more visible, shareable, and collectively manageable. A two-wave quasi-experimental design was used with 460 students at T1 and 382 usable follow-up cases at T2. The intervention embedded small mutual-aid groups into large lecture sections through guided check-ins, reciprocal help-seeking norms, shared planning, and brief collective coping routines. Multi-item measures assessed peer support, academic stress, stress transmission, negative emotional contagion, class belonging, collective coping efficacy, help-seeking openness, and academic loneliness. Baseline-adjusted ANCOVA models indicated that students in peer mutual-aid sections reported higher T2 peer support, belonging, collective coping efficacy, and help-seeking openness, and lower T2 academic stress, stress transmission, negative emotional contagion, and academic loneliness than students in standard large lecture sections. Effects remained significant after multiple-comparison correction. The findings suggest that peer mutual aid in large classes may be associated with less spread of academic distress not by denying stress, but by reshaping the communication processes through which students encounter, interpret, negotiate, and collectively manage academic challenges. More broadly, the findings support the view that academic stress transmission is not merely a psychological phenomenon but also a communicative process embedded in everyday peer interaction.