scholarly journals Boosting positive mood in medical and emergency personnel during the COVID-19 pandemic: preliminary evidence of efficacy, feasibility and acceptability of a novel online ambulatory intervention

2021 ◽  
pp. oemed-2021-107427
Author(s):  
Karin G. Coifman ◽  
David D Disabato ◽  
T H Stanley Seah ◽  
Sarah Ostrowski-Delahanty ◽  
Patrick A Palmieri ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Health ◽  
Expressive Writing ◽  
Positive Emotion ◽  
Negative Emotion ◽  
Medical Personnel ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Smartphone Application ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
High Dose ◽  
Emergency Responders

ObjectivesThe aim of this project was to test the efficacy of a brief and novel online ambulatory intervention aimed at supporting psychological health and well-being for medical personnel and first responders during the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsInterested participants, n=28, actively employed as medical personnel, support staff and emergency responders, in the Midwestern USA in May–June of 2020, provided informed consent and were randomised to complete either low-dose or high-dose intervention, one time daily for 1 week via smartphone application. Each daily intervention included expressive writing, adaptive emotion regulation activity and (one vs two) positive emotion-generation activities, lasting 3–6 min a day. Ratings of negative and positive emotion were provided before and after each activity daily. Analyses tested compliance, acceptability, as well as efficacy at increasing positive emotion and decreasing negative emotion with each use and across time.ResultsThe results indicated a 13% increase in positive emotion, t(25)=2.01, p=0.056; and decrease in negative emotion by 44%, t(25)=−4.00, p=0.001 across both doses. However, there was a clear advantage for individuals in the high-dose condition as daily boosts in positive emotion were significantly greater (an additional 9.4%) B=0.47, p=0.018. Overall, compliance was good. Acceptability ratings were good for those who completed the follow-up assessment.ConclusionFront-line personnel, including medical staff and emergency responders, are experiencing unprecedented psychological stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. This investigation suggests both feasibility and efficacy for a brief, daily, ambulatory intervention which could provide essential psychological support to individuals at risk in the workplace.

scholarly journals Development of a Positive Psychology Program (LAVENDER) for Preserving Medical Student Well-being: A Single-Arm Pilot Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 216495612098848
Author(s):  
Elaine O Cheung ◽  
Ian Kwok ◽  
Allison B Ludwig ◽  
William Burton ◽  
Xinzi Wang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Medical Student ◽  
Medical Students ◽  
Positive Psychology ◽  
Positive Emotion ◽  
Albert Einstein College ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Psychology Program

Background Mental health tends to worsen over the course of medical school, with steep declines in well-being in students’ clerkship year (M3). Positive emotion promotes adaptive coping to stress and may help preserve medical student well-being. Objective This study describes the development of LAVENDER (Leveraging Affect and Valuing Empathy for Nurturing Doctors’ Emotional Resilience), a program aimed at increasing positive emotion to preserve well-being in medical students. Methods We conducted a single-arm pilot of LAVENDER, a positive psychology intervention developed for medical students delivered in an interactive classroom format to a cohort of 157 third-year medical students at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Our primary outcome was the acceptability of LAVENDER. We also examined preliminary efficacy using measures of emotion, stress and burnout collected at each intervention session. Results LAVENDER showed good acceptability: 76% of participants agreed that the LAVENDER skills were useful and 72% agreed that they would recommend the LAVENDER program to others. Qualitative feedback suggested that medical students enjoyed the program and found the skills to be useful for coping with stress, but also reported the following barriers to engagement: lack of time to practice the skills, resistance to the mandatory nature of the wellness sessions, and difficulty integrating the skills in daily life. We did not find support for the preliminary efficacy of LAVENDER for improving medical student well-being in students’ clerkship year. Participants showed decreases in positive emotion and increases in symptoms of burnout over the intervention period ( ps < .01). Conclusion The current paper describes the development and a single-arm pilot test of LAVENDER, a positive psychology program tailored for medical students. Although we found preliminary evidence for the acceptability of LAVENDER, we did not find support for the preliminary efficacy. Lessons learned and next steps for the program are discussed.

scholarly journals Environmental volunteer well-being: Managers’ perception and actual well-being of volunteers

F1000Research ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 2679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gitte Kragh ◽  
Rick Stafford ◽  
Susanna Curtin ◽  
Anita Diaz
Keyword(s):  
Positive Emotion ◽  
Negative Emotion ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Multidimensional Approach ◽  
Biodiversity Monitoring ◽  
Control Groups ◽  
Online Surveys ◽  
Multidimensional Construct ◽  
Positive Elements ◽  
Environmental Volunteering

Background: Environmental volunteering can increase well-being, but environmental volunteer well-being has rarely been compared to participant well-being associated with other types of volunteering or nature-based activities. This paper aims to use a multidimensional approach to well-being to explore the immediately experienced and later remembered well-being of environmental volunteers and to compare this to the increased well-being of participants in other types of nature-based activities and volunteering. Furthermore, it aims to compare volunteer managers’ perceptions of their volunteers’ well-being with the self-reported well-being of the volunteers. Methods: Onsite surveys were conducted of practical conservation and biodiversity monitoring volunteers, as well as their control groups (walkers and fieldwork students, respectively), to measure general well-being before their nature-based activity and activity-related well-being immediately after their activity. Online surveys of current, former and potential volunteers and volunteer managers measured remembered volunteering-related well-being and managers’ perceptions of their volunteers’ well-being. Data were analysed based on Seligman’s multidimensional PERMA (‘positive emotion’, ‘engagement’, ‘positive relationship’, ‘meaning’, ‘achievement’) model of well-being. Factor analysis recovered three of the five PERMA elements, ‘engagement’, ‘relationship’ and ‘meaning’, as well as ‘negative emotion’ and ‘health’ as factors. Results: Environmental volunteering significantly improved positive elements and significantly decreased negative elements of participants’ immediate well-being, and it did so more than walking or student fieldwork. Even remembering their volunteering up to six months later, volunteers rated their volunteering-related well-being higher than volunteers rated their well-being generally in life. However, volunteering was not found to have an effect on overall mean well-being generally in life. Volunteer managers did not perceive the significant increase in well-being that volunteers reported. Conclusions: This study showed how environmental volunteering immediately improved participants’ well-being, even more than other nature-based activities. It highlights the benefit of regarding well-being as a multidimensional construct to more systematically understand, support and enhance volunteer well-being.

scholarly journals Subjective well-being and month-long LF/HF ratio among deskworkers

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (9) ◽  
pp. e0257062
Author(s):  
Kiko Shiga ◽  
Keisuke Izumi ◽  
Kazumichi Minato ◽  
Tatsuki Sugio ◽  
Michitaka Yoshimura ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Regression Analysis ◽  
Multiple Regression Analysis ◽  
Multiple Regression ◽  
Positive Emotion ◽  
Negative Emotion ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Satisfaction With Life Scale ◽  
Parasympathetic Nerve ◽  
Pulse Waves ◽  
The Mean

The importance of workers’ well-being has been recognized in recent years. The assessment of well-being has been subjective, and few studies have sought potential biomarkers of well-being to date. This study examined the relationship between well-being and the LF/HF ratio, an index of heart rate variability that reflects sympathetic and parasympathetic nerve activity. Pulse waves were measured using photoplethysmography through a web camera attached to the computer used by each participant. The participants were asked to measure their pulse waves while working for 4 weeks, and well-being was assessed using self-reported measures such as the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), and the Flourishing Scale (FS). Each of the well-being scores were split into two groups according to the median value, and the LF/HF ratio during work, as well as the number of times an LF/HF ratio threshold was either exceeded or subceeded, were compared between the high and low SWLS, positive emotion, negative emotion, and FS groups. Furthermore, to examine the effects of the LF/HF ratio and demographic characteristics on well-being, a multiple regression analysis was conducted. Data were obtained from 169 participants. The results showed that the low FS group had a higher mean LF/HF ratio during work than the high FS group. No significant differences were seen between the high and low SWLS groups, the high and low positive emotion groups, or the high and low negative emotion groups. The multiple regression analysis showed that the mean LF/HF ratio during work affected the FS and SWLS scores, and the number of times the mean LF/HF ratio exceeded +3 SD had an effect on the positive emotion. No effect of the LF/HF ratio on negative emotions was shown. The LF/HF ratio might be applicable as an objective measure of well-being.

scholarly journals Automatic emotion recognition in healthcare data using supervised machine learning

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. e751
Author(s):  
Nazish Azam ◽  
Tauqir Ahmad ◽  
Nazeef Ul Haq
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Psychological Health ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
Negative Emotion ◽  
Emotional Health ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Supervised Machine Learning ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
Healthcare Data

Human feelings are fundamental to perceive the conduct and state of mind of an individual. A healthy emotional state is one significant highlight to improve personal satisfaction. On the other hand, bad emotional health can prompt social or psychological well-being issues. Recognizing or detecting feelings in online health care data gives important and helpful information regarding the emotional state of patients. To recognize or detection of patient’s emotion against a specific disease using text from online sources is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a method for the automatic detection of patient’s emotions in healthcare data using supervised machine learning approaches. For this purpose, we created a new dataset named EmoHD, comprising of 4,202 text samples against eight disease classes and six emotion classes, gathered from different online resources. We used six different supervised machine learning models based on different feature engineering techniques. We also performed a detailed comparison of the chosen six machine learning algorithms using different feature vectors on our dataset. We achieved the highest 87% accuracy using MultiLayer Perceptron as compared to other state of the art models. Moreover, we use the emotional guidance scale to show that there is a link between negative emotion and psychological health issues. Our proposed work will be helpful to automatically detect a patient’s emotion during disease and to avoid extreme acts like suicide, mental disorders, or psychological health issues. The implementation details are made publicly available at the given link: https://bit.ly/2NQeGET.

Comment: Homing in on a Balanced Psychology

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-63
Author(s):  
Jeff T. Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Positive Psychology ◽  
Positive Affect ◽  
Positive Emotion ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Negative Emotion ◽  
Negative Emotions ◽  
Well Being ◽  
To Come ◽  
Positive And Negative Emotions

Hernandez et al.’s (2018) review provides clear evidence that positive affect can contribute to well-being and fits nicely within the positive psychology framework. The emergence of positive psychology has been valuable for understanding well-being, but I suggest that a balanced psychology can prove even more valuable in the years to come. A balanced psychology requires giving as much attention to negative emotion as to positive emotion. It also requires considering whether there are circumstances in which positive emotions can be detrimental and negative emotions can be beneficial. Along those lines, evidence reviewed here indicates that healthy coping with severe stressors involves experiencing a combination of positive and negative emotions.

scholarly journals ASSOCIATION BETWEEN WORKLOAD AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING IN MALAYSIA ELITE FIREFIGHTER

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 374-381
Author(s):  
Khairilmizal Samsudin ◽  
Mohamad Fahmi Hussin ◽  
Nur Fatin Najihah Ghazali ◽  
Nur Hannani Abdul Ghani ◽  
Ainul Husna Kamarudin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Health ◽  
Critical Incident ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Health Problems ◽  
Contributing Factors ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Psychological Well Being ◽  
Study Objective ◽  
Emergency Responders

Emergency responders are frequently exposed to life-threatening risks when attending to critical incident events causing an increasing number of psychological health issues among emergency responders. However, few studies are related to workload and its association with Malaysian emergency responders' mental health problems. Hence, the study objective is to identify the level of workload, determine the level of psychological well-being and their association with Malaysian firefighters. A cross-sectional study was conducted among Grade A and B stations firefighters in Kota Bharu Kelantan using a validated NASA-TLX and DASS-21 questionnaire through a purposive sampling method. Respondents were divided into standard operations teams and elite teams such as Emergency Medical Rescue Services (EMRS). Results show that although EMRS, the medical team has the highest overall workload demand, firefighters deemed performance and effort demand a significant workload demand comparing to others. It is also found that most firefighters have higher anxiety issues comparing to depression and stress, where 30% to 61% of respondents develop a certain level of anxiety corresponding to only 15% to 39% for depression and 13% to 28% for stress. Hence, it is suggested that further research should be conducted in investigating and understanding the contributing factors towards Malaysian firefighters’ psychological health problems so that they can be managed or even prevented.

scholarly journals Sleep quality is associated with the experience and adaptive regulation of positive emotion: an experience sampling study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Elizabeth Parsons ◽  
Beatrice Ellen Schofield ◽  
Sofia Batziou ◽  
Camilla Ward ◽  
Katherine Seaton Young
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Emotion Regulation ◽  
Sleep Quality ◽  
Positive Emotion ◽  
Negative Emotion ◽  
Negative Emotions ◽  
Smartphone Application ◽  
Emotional Dysregulation ◽  
Poor Sleep ◽  
Positive And Negative Emotions

Poor sleep patterns have been strongly linked to disrupted emotional experiences. Emotion regulation, defined as the capacity to manage one’s own emotional responses, is comprised of strategies to increase, maintain, or decrease the intensity, duration, and trajectory of positive and negative emotions. Poor sleep has been identified as a risk factor for emotional dysregulation, but most of the focus has been on negative emotion regulation. We therefore asked whether natural variations in sleep are associated with the experience and regulation of both positive and negative emotion. Young adults, aged between 18-24 years, (n = 101) completed seven-days of ecological momentary assessments using a smartphone application. Duration and quality of the previous night’s sleep was reported each morning. Levels of positive and negative emotions, and the strategies used to regulate emotions, were measured at pseudo-random timepoints four times a day. Multilevel modelling indicated that higher self-reported sleep quality was significantly associated with increased intensity and duration of positive emotion, and decreased intensity of negative emotion. Sleep quality, and not sleep duration, was also associated with reported use of adaptive positive emotion regulation strategies. For negative emotion regulation strategy use, we found no associations with sleep quality or duration. Naturally occurring fluctuations in daily sleep quality may be important for the experience and regulation of positive emotion in young adults. These findings emphasise the need to examine both positive and negative emotion, and emotion regulation to understand the links between sleep and mood.

scholarly journals Attentional Bias and Well-Being

2019 ◽  
pp. 118-136
Author(s):  
Ben Grafton ◽  
Colin MacLeod
Keyword(s):  
Attentional Bias ◽  
Positive Emotion ◽  
Negative Emotion ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Maladaptive Behavior ◽  
Attentional Biases ◽  
Stimulus Information ◽  
Selective Processing ◽  
Affective Information ◽  
Emotional Disposition

This chapter reviews work that has sought to examine how biased patterns of attentional responding to affectively valenced information can contribute to variability in both emotional and situational well-being. It begins by critically appraising the cognitive–experimental procedures that have most commonly been employed to assess such attentional bias. Next, the chapter considers findings from research that have employed these assessment approaches to investigate how individual differences in attentional bias toward either negatively toned or positively toned affective information may contribute to variability in emotional disposition. The chapter then discusses research that has examined how the selective processing of aversive information concerning prospective threat and selective attentional responding to positively toned appetitive stimulus information may impact the prospect of engaging in behaviors that have the capacity to enhance or impair situational well-being. In doing so, this chapter highlights the possibility that these types of attentional biases may directly contribute to dissociation between emotional and situational well-being, either by evoking negative emotion while also increasing the prospect of adaptive behavior or by evoking positive emotion while increasing the prospect of maladaptive behavior.

scholarly journals From Knowledge to Differentiation: Increasing Emotion Knowledge Through an Intervention Increases Negative Emotion Differentiation

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evgeniya Vedernikova ◽  
Peter Kuppens ◽  
Yasemin Erbas
Keyword(s):  
Positive Emotion ◽  
Negative Emotion ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Emotion Knowledge ◽  
Significance Level ◽  
Emotion Differentiation ◽  
Before And After ◽  
High Degree

Labeling emotions with a high degree of granularity appears to be beneficial for well-being. However, there are individual differences in the level of emotion differentiation, and some individuals do not appear to differentiate much between different emotions. Low differentiation is associated with maladaptive outcomes, therefore such individuals might benefit from interventions that can increase their level of emotion differentiation. To this end, we tested the effects of an emotion knowledge intervention on the level of emotion differentiation. One hundred and twenty participants were assigned to either an experimental or a control condition. Emotion differentiation was assessed with a Scenario Rating Task before and after the intervention, and at follow-up. As predicted, negative emotion differentiation increased significantly after the emotion knowledge intervention, and this increase was not observed in the control group. Positive emotion differentiation also increased slightly; however, it did not reach significance level. This finding suggests that an emotion knowledge intervention might be beneficial for increasing negative emotion differentiation and may have implications for the clinical context.

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