Search Results (16)

This perspective advances a psychoanalytic—embodiment account of the “libido of generativity” (LoG)—future-oriented reorganization of erotic desire that links embodied arousal with caregiving, legacy, and shared projects. We define LoG along four axes (direction of investment: dyad↔triad; temporal horizon: immediacy↔future; outcome modalities: procreative, creative–sublimative, community-forming; affective regulation: shame/guilt↔pride/gratitude). Integrating interoception, body ownership/agency, and self-compassion with reproductive mentalizing, we specify three proximal levers—embodiment, affect regulation, and representation—through which sexual mindfulness can recalibrate bodily salience, blunt shame-based self-objectification, and expand triadic representations (self–partner–child/symbolic offspring). We then translate these mechanisms into a brief, practice-ready relationship guidance (RG) curriculum (6–8 sessions) combining somatic mindfulness, compassion micro-practices, reproductive-mentalizing dialogs, communication skills, and generative rituals. We articulate falsifiable propositions (e.g., mindfulness → ↑couple satisfaction via ↓body-image self-consciousness and ↑reproductive mentalizing) and a sex/gender-attentive reporting plan (SAGER). Primary outcomes include sexual functioning/satisfaction and couple satisfaction/communication; secondary mechanistic endpoints index interoceptive accuracy/awareness (including heartbeat-evoked potentials), self-compassion, and reproductive mentalizing. By aligning contemplative practices with couple-skills training and equity-focused implementation, the LoG framework offers a testable bridge from psychoanalytic theory and embodiment science to measurable improvements in sexual health and couple well-being. Full article

It is important to study if and how athletes’ mental resilience and mindfulness are connected, because both could promote mental health, as well as facilitate coping with stress and successful athletic performance. It was hypothesized that mental resilience and mindfulness would correlate, and also that mental resilience and mindfulness would differ in both means and correlation strength according to the type of sport. The possible nexus of mental resilience and mindfulness with the longevity of sports practice was also examined. The sample consisted of 177 athletes whose mean age was 21 years old and whose average sports practice lasted 8.7 years. Most of them were professional athletes (N = 121, 68.4%). They practiced individual sports (N = 85, 48.0%), combat sports (N = 47, 26.6%), and team sports (N = 45, 25.4%). The Bulgarian adaptations of the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale and the Brief Resilience Scale were used. The athletes’ mental resilience and mindfulness correlated significantly and positively. The athletes’ mental resilience correlated positively with the years of sports practice among the amateur athletes and among the athletes practicing team sports. The athletes’ mindfulness increased with age for the athletes practicing combat sports and team sports. Mindfulness diminished with more years of sports practice for the amateur athletes and for those practicing individual sports. The athletes practicing combat sports had higher mental resilience than those practicing individual sports and those practicing team sports. The male athletes had higher mental resilience than the female athletes. The established positive nexus between the athletes’ mental resilience and mindfulness means that training mindfulness could be a mechanism for strengthening mental resilience, as well as higher mental resilience could facilitate mindful awareness of the present moment and focus attention on what is happening now. The athletes practicing individual sports are those who need more training for enhancing mindfulness and mental resilience. Physical activity and sports participation may contribute to mental health improvement by strengthening mindfulness and mental resilience. Full article

Police officers work in high-stress environments that demand emotional resilience, interpersonal skills, and effective communication. Occupational stress can negatively impact their motivation, conflict resolution abilities, and professional effectiveness. Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM), a mindfulness-based intervention focused on cultivating compassion and empathy, has shown promise in enhancing prosocial attitudes and emotional regulation. With the rise of short video platforms, digital interventions like video-guided LKM may offer accessible mental health support for law enforcement. This study examines the effects of short video app-guided LKM on police officers’ mindfulness, public service motivation (PSM), conflict resolution skills (CRSs), and communication skills (CSSs). It aims to determine whether LKM can enhance these psychological and professional competencies. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) was conducted with 110 active-duty police officers from a metropolitan police department in China, with 92 completing the study. Participants were randomly assigned to either the LKM group (n = 46) or the waitlist control group (n = 46). The intervention consisted of a 6-week short video app-guided LKM program with daily 10 min meditation sessions. Pre- and post-intervention assessments were conducted using several validated scales: the Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS), the Public Service Motivation Scale (PSM), the Conflict Resolution Styles Inventory (CRSI), and the Communication Competence Scale (CCS). A 2 (Group: LKM vs. Control) × 2 (Time: Pre vs. Post) mixed-design MANOVA was conducted to analyze the effects. Statistical analyses revealed significant group-by-time interaction effects for PSM (F(4,177) = 21.793, p < 0.001, η² = 0.108), CRS (F(4,177) = 20.920, p < 0.001, η² = 0.104), and CSS (F(4,177) = 49.095, p < 0.001, η² = 0.214), indicating improvements in these areas for LKM participants. However, no significant improvement was observed for mindfulness (F(4,177) = 2.850, p = 0.930, η² = 0.016). Short video app-guided LKM improves public service motivation, conflict resolution skills, and communication skills among police officers but does not significantly enhance mindfulness. These findings suggest that brief, digitally delivered compassion-focused programs can be seamlessly incorporated into routine in-service training to strengthen officers’ prosocial motivation, de-escalation competence, and public-facing communication, thereby fostering more constructive police–community interactions. Full article

Background: Developing and cultivating mindfulness exerts a positive effect on psychological and cognitive performance. Sharpening the skill requires continuous mindfulness-based training (MT), which can be challenging for people leading busy lives. Therefore, the current study examined whether trait mindfulness can be improved by a flexible and brief MT program of self-breathing using a pre–post intervention design. Methods: Trait mindfulness was assessed using the Japanese version of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) before the intervention (pre), after 2 weeks (during), and 4 weeks after the intervention started (post). Data were analyzed using the Friedman test followed by the Dunn–Bonferroni correction. Results: The study sample consisted of 22 healthy participants aged from 20 to 60 years with no previous experience with yoga or meditation equivalent to MT. The mean number of days of MT practice was 26.4, and 11 participants had interruptions. The median values of pre-, during-, and post-total FFMQ scores were 115.5, 123, and 129, respectively. Significant differences were observed in the total pre and post (p < 0.001) and during and post (p = 0.002) FFMQ scores, though a medium effect was found (r = 0.30) only between the pre and post scores. Of the five sub-scales of FFMQ, significant differences were observed only between pre and post Observing (p = 0.01), Nonreactivity (p < 0.001), and Describing (p = 0.01), and during and post Nonjudging (p = 0.016), and Nonreactivity (p = 0.025). Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the simple, brief, and flexible self-breathing method employed in this study has a substantial effect on fostering trait mindfulness and, therefore, can be adopted by people with hectic daily schedules. Full article

The increasing mental health challenges among elders demand specialized interventions, especially within Thai communities where resources are limited and stigma persists. While monks offer spiritual support, there is a gap in addressing complex mental health needs. This research aims to develop a monk-led elderly mental health counseling program in Thai Buddhist communities. From January 2023 to March 2024, this study underwent four phases. Initially, qualitative interviews with thirty-six monk and elder participants elucidated requirements. The program development integrated findings from the requirement study, the Solution-Focused Brief Therapy process, and Buddhist mindfulness principles to create a prototype. The quality assessment involved expert content validation, feasibility examination by stakeholders, and a small-scale pilot testing with five monks. Finally, the feasibility of the program was assessed with thirty-two monks. The study reveals three key components of the monk-led elderly counseling program focused on mental health: the counseling process known as MPS-MAV-PI (an Introduction to Mindfulness, Identifying Problems, Assessing the Severity, Mindfully Observing Thoughts and Emotions, Acceptance, Visualizing Success, Planning Strategies for Problem-solving, and Implementation and Subsequent Monitoring), the C-TIME strategy (Collaboration, Training Manual, Implementation, the Monitoring, and Evaluation), and the program manual. Moreover, feasibility assessments among monks show the high feasibility of the program for implementation. The monk-led counseling program holds promise in addressing these challenges, with high feasibility indicating potential effectiveness and scalability. Future research will prioritize evaluating its cost-effectiveness and overall effectiveness. Full article

College students experiencing psychological distress have significantly greater negative emotions than students who practice compassionate thinking. We have developed Eight Steps to Great Compassion (ESGC), an innovative brief and no-cost online video training program about how to increase compassion among busy and young adult university students. To examine the effectiveness and benefits of the ESGC, a single-group pre-test–post-test quantitative design with undergraduate university students (N = 92; M_age = 20.39) evaluated its effects. The results from the post-test showed that the ESGC had a significant positive impact on increased feelings of compassion towards oneself, compassion for others, and the sense of personal well-being from the pre-test. The analysis of the PERMA-Profiler subscales also reflected a statistically significant increase in overall well-being and health and a decrease in negative emotions and loneliness. From the Post-Survey Lesson Feedback, 88% of the participants reported significant positive changes in themselves and the way that they live due to the program. These findings appear to show important implications for improving healthy minds and reducing negative emotions among university students. Full article

(1) Background: Stress is defined as a psychological sensation related to a change in both human physiology and behavior in response to a threat or challenge. As the prevalence of stress is increasing globally, nurses represent a risk group for exposure to stress-related psychological alterations. The aim of this study was to explore how clinical nurses in Lithuania cope with the perceived chronic stress in relation to additional emotional experiences following the death of a patient. (2) Methods: During a four-week period of October 2023, a total of 283 female nurses, aged between 20 and 70 years old, were enrolled in a single cross-sectional study. The PSS-10 (perceived stress scale) and the Brief-COPE (Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced) questionnaires were applied to assess the level of self-perceived stress and the use of coping styles along with the adequate strategies. Furthermore, the nurses’ emotions, evoked following patient death, were classified depending on their valence. Both the multiple linear and logistic regression statistical analyses were conducted to examine the associations between dependent and independent variables. (3) Results: The study identified that more than half of the nurses experienced patient death several times a month. A moderate-to-high level of the symptoms of mental chronic stress were suffered by 76% of caregivers. The psychological arousal following the death of a patient may induce the occurrence of emotional complexity that refers to competitive feelings, namely, helplessness (adjusted odd ratio (AOR) 1.7, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.1; 2.9), disappointment (AOR 1.9, 95% CI 1.1; 3.5), anxiety (AOR 1.9, 95% CI 1.2; 4.2), and guilt (OR_adj 4.7, 95% CI 1.4; 5.7), and can serve as a potential trigger for chronic stress development in clinical nurses. In terms of emotion-focused stress control (β 0.1, 95% CI −0.1; −0.2, R² = 0.12), Lithuanian nurses had low control of the perceived chronic stress. The use of problem-focused coping (β −0.2, 95% CI −0.3; −0.1, R² = 0.09) was also not addressed to an appropriate extent. The use of the avoidance coping style was associated with moderate–high levels of chronic stress perceived by nurses (β 0.5, 95% CI 0.4; 0.7, R² = 0.24). Furthermore, the avoidant coping strategy related to behavioral disengagement was significantly related to resilience to chronic stress in an adverse way. The cognitive process of self-blame was considered as a meaningful maladaptive behavior component for magnifying chronic stress in nurses. (4) Conclusions: The study highlights the need to implement the recommendations for boosting the nurses’ mental health. Hospitals should contribute to psychological assistance along with providing necessary training on stress-coping strategies for clinical nurses. In order to promote the sustainability of mental health through additional social support interventions, it would be useful to upgrade the clinical nurses’ daily routines with mindfulness-based trainings. Full article

Eating disorders are a global burden and present personal, family, and societal costs. Most evidence in the literature is based on the relationship between a poor family environment and eating disorders, and the evidence of gender interaction in eating disorders is inconsistent. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between family environment and eating disorder symptoms, the mediating role of negative automatic thoughts, and the moderating role of gender using a non-clinical sample of students. A sample of 440 (70.9% females, aged 18–21) participated in this study. They completed the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26), the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire (ATQ negative), and the Brief Family Relationship Scale (BFRS). PROCESS MACRO was used to study these relationships. The main findings revealed that family environment was negatively associated with eating disorder symptoms and that this relationship was mediated by automatic thoughts. Moreover, gender moderated those relationships, and more intensely in females. The results of this study indicate that the prevention of eating disorders should be directed at training individuals to challenge negative thoughts and encourage healthy individuals to be gender mindful. Full article

Drawing on the emerging area of workplace sustainability, this study sought to measure the effects of multimodal physical and cognitive fitness training on sustaining mental health and job readiness via impacts on subjective burnout, mental wellbeing, and resilience in a military cohort. Volunteer participants were block randomised into either a standard 4-week resilient mind program (RMP) intervention or an RMP combined with self-paced functional imagery practice (RMP+FI). Self-reported burnout, mental wellbeing, and resilience were measured at baseline and at the end of the 4-week intervention using the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS), Brief Resilience Scale (BRS), and the World Health Organization’s WHO-5 Well-Being Index (WHO-5), respectively. A total of 78 participants were enrolled in the study and 72 (92%) completed the program. Repeated measures ANOVAs showed significant effects of the RMP intervention, with both the RMP and RMP+FI groups reporting improved resilience (F(1, 70) = 13.08, p < 0.001, partial ω² = 0.00086) and mental wellbeing (F(1, 70) = 41.86, p < 0.001, partial ω² = 0.36). Both groups also reported improved burnout markers for professional efficacy (F(1, 70) = 6.25, p < 0.002, partial ω² = 0.02), as well as reduced emotional exhaustion (F(1, 70) = 31.84, p < 0.001, partial ω² = 0.02) and job cynicism (F(1, 70) = 8.80, p < 0.005, partial ω² = 0.005). The FI practice produced no significant improvement in the RMP-only condition. Our results support the efficacy of RMP intervention in reducing burnout symptoms and improving self-reported mental wellbeing and resilience in a cohort of serving Navy aviators. Full article

Introduction: People with HIV (PWH) who smoke have reported that managing anxiety is a barrier to making a quit attempt and maintaining abstinence post-quit. This study examined the feasibility and acceptability of an app-based mindfulness intervention, Unwinding Anxiety, to reduce anxiety prior to a quit attempt in PWH who were not planning to quit in the next 30 days. Methods: Sixteen PWH (mean age 51.5 [SD = 13.2]; mean cigarettes per day 11.4 [SD = 5.4]) were enrolled and followed for eight weeks. A smartphone-based app with 30 modules designed to reduce anxiety was introduced at baseline; participants were encouraged to complete one module daily for four weeks. Symptoms of anxiety and readiness to quit smoking were measured at baseline and weeks 4 and 8. The mean number of modules completed, session attendance, and number of study completers were examined. Generalized estimating equations (GEE) were used to examine changes in self-reported anxiety and readiness to quit at baseline, week 4, and week 8. A brief qualitative interview was conducted at week 4 to explore the acceptability of the app. Results: Feasibility was high, with 93% of participants completing the study. The mean number of study sessions completed was 2.7 (SD = 0.59), and the mean number of modules completed was 16.0 (SD 16.8). Anxiety was high at baseline (M = 14.4, SD = 3.9), but lower at week 4 (b = −5.5; CI: [−9.4, −1.7]; p = 0.004) and week 8 (b = −5.1; CI: [−8.8, −1.3]; p = 0.008), and stable between weeks 4 and 8 (b = 0.48; CI: [−2.0, 3.0]; p = 0.706). Readiness to quit significantly increased from baseline M = 5.5 (SD = 1.6) to week 4 (b = 0.56; CI: [0.20, 0.91]; p = 0.002) but was not significantly different from baseline at week 8 (b = 0.34; CI: [−0.30, 1.0]; p = 0.30). Ad-hoc moderation analyses found that anxiety had a small significantly positive association with readiness to quit at baseline (main effect: b = 0.10; SE = 0.03; p < 0.001) and significantly attenuated the increase in readiness to quit observed at week 4 (anxiety by week 4 interaction: b = −0.08; SE = 0.03; p = 0.009). Conclusions: App-based mindfulness training appears to be feasible and acceptable for PWH who smoke and report baseline anxiety. At week 4, anxiety was reduced and readiness to quit was increased, perhaps a key time point for a smoking cessation attempt. Full article

The mental health crisis across college campuses is accelerating, with anxiety listed as the top mental health issue for undergraduate college students. Although evidence suggests the COVID-19 pandemic escalated the mental health crisis on college campuses, pre-COVID-19 anxiety among college students was on the rise. Research supports Mindfulness Based Interventions (MBIs) to reduce anxiety among college students. Additionally, exposure to natural environments, which are accessible to students on college campuses, is effective in reducing anxiety. While brief nature-based mindfulness interventions appear effective in reducing anxiety among college students, these interventions are often offered in isolation without social interaction among group members and lack intentional integration of mindfulness and nature-related theories. The purpose of this work is to describe a framework for integrating the use of Mindfulness and Attention Restoration Theory (ART) in an innovative psychoeducational group intervention, Nature-Based Mindfulness Training © (NBMT), for college students with anxiety. In conclusion, we argue for the need to intentionally integrate mindfulness and nature into nature-based mindfulness interventions as an effective and sustainable means to reduce anxiety. Limitations and areas for future research are described. Full article

The social determinants of health (SDH) have long been considered a core mechanism through which racial health inequities are (re)produced and incubated in the U.S. Moreover, scholars have expressly—and appropriately—named structural racism as a precursor to inequities associated with SDH. However, while research on racial health inequities—SDH-related or otherwise—continues to grow, communities of color remain grossly underrepresented as public health researchers and practitioners. Additionally, although SDH are experienced in a very local sense, much research and practice fails to more deeply and thoroughly engage and center local community knowledges. Thus, much work around SDH and racial health inequities presents, ironically, as structurally racist itself—being done/led mostly by White scholars and in ways that do not “center the margins”. Moreover, in the context of public health practice, youth perspective is seldom centered within local health department (LHD) community SDH assessment efforts. With these challenges in mind, this paper introduces and discusses the development of the youth health equity and action research training (yHEART) program as a model for public health researchers/practitioners to engage public health critical race praxis (PHCRP) to better understand and respond to local SDH in communities of color. Specifically, we highlight the significance of PHCRP principles of “voice” and “social construction of knowledge” in advancing antiracism in research and LHD practice related to local SDH. First, we articulate core conceptual and theoretical groundings that informed the yHEART program’s development and animate its ongoing training and research activities. Second, we outline the program’s core training components and overall process, and provide some brief illustrative examples of work completed during the program’s first iteration—yHEART PDX, Vol.I: Youth Participatory Research on Local Social Determinants of Health. We then close with a discussion that reflects on program strengths, challenges, and implications for SDH and racial health equity research/practice in light of growing calls for an antiracist public health. Full article

This study aims to develop a clinical trial to test the efficacy of a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and self-compassion (SC) program on self-reported values of anxiety, depression, and stress in parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in primary school, in order to assess their integration into the framework of community intervention programs in Spain. Methods: A brief 8-week training program using mindfulness-based intervention (MBSR) and self-compassion (SC) has been applied to twelve Valencian ASD parents, ten of whom completed the program. Participants were assigned to two groups; both groups received the same treatment but at two different measurement moments. Depression, anxiety, stress, satisfaction with life and mindful attention awareness measurements were performed, in all participants, in three testing stages. Results: Analysis of variance results suggested that MBSR and SC training reduces stress and anxiety and increases mindful attention awareness. No significant changes were found in life satisfaction measurements. Conclusions: The small number of participants prevents us from generalizing the results found. More MBSR and SC clinical trials are needed in parents of ASD with results on anxiety, depression and stress in order to demonstrate the relevance of the inclusion of these programs in community-based early intervention services. Full article

Facial micro expressions are brief, spontaneous, and crucial emotions deep inside the mind, reflecting the actual thoughts for that moment. Humans can cover their emotions on a large scale, but their actual intentions and emotions can be extracted at a micro-level. Micro expressions are organic when compared with macro expressions, posing a challenge to both humans, as well as machines, to identify. In recent years, detection of facial expressions are widely used in commercial complexes, hotels, restaurants, psychology, security, offices, and education institutes. The aim and motivation of this paper are to provide an end-to-end architecture that accurately detects the actual expressions at the micro-scale features. However, the main research is to provide an analysis of the specific parts that are crucial for detecting the micro expressions from a face. Many states of the art approaches have been trained on the micro facial expressions and compared with our proposed Lossless Attention Residual Network (LARNet) approach. However, the main research on this is to provide analysis on the specific parts that are crucial for detecting the micro expressions from a face. Many CNN-based approaches extracts the features at local level which digs much deeper into the face pixels. However, the spatial and temporal information extracted from the face is encoded in LARNet for a feature fusion extraction on specific crucial locations, such as nose, cheeks, mouth, and eyes regions. LARNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with a slight margin by accurately detecting facial micro expressions in real-time. Lastly, the proposed LARNet becomes accurate and better by training with more annotated data. Full article

Mindfulness training has been extensively researched and found to elicit positive effects on cognitive performance, including working memory capacity. Benefits to cognitive function have been extended to brief mindfulness training as well. However, not much is known about its effect on working memory capacity. The current study examined the effects of a single 15-min session of mindful attention to breathing compared to a 15-min session of mind-wandering exercise in a within-subjects experimental design (Study 1; N = 82) and a between-subjects experimental design (Study 2; N = 424). Contrary to our hypotheses, in both experiments, we did not find any evidence that participants in the mindfulness condition outperform the control condition on an operation span task (Study 1) and a symmetry span task (Study 2). These results suggest that a single session of mindful practice may not be sufficient to enhance working memory capacity. Full article