Short Term Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic On Progress Test Outcomes and Emotional State of Medical Students: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic has been the source of many challenges for medical students worldwide. The authors examined short-term effects on knowledge gain as well as shifts in learning behavior and study-related emotional states.Method The development of knowledge gain was measured comparing the outcomes of shared questions within Progress Test (PT) pairs. The authors used mixed-effect regression models and compared the absolute variations in the percentage of correct answers per subject. Three successive test pairs were analyzed in this manner: PT36-PT41 (both conducted before the pandemic), PT37-PT42 (PT37 took place before the pandemic; PT42 was conducted from April 2020 onwards) and PT38-PT43 (PT38 was administered before the pandemic; PT43 started in November 2020). A survey including closed and open-ended questions was also carried out in January 2021 with the purpose of assessing the learning behavior and emotional state of participants. Open-ended responses were analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Results The most recent test of each PT-pair showed a higher mean score compared to the previous test in the same pair (PT36-PT41: 2.53 (95% CI: 1.31-3.75), PT37-PT42: 3.72 (2.57-4.88), PT38-PT43: 5.59 (4.37-6-81)). Analogously, an increase in the share of correct answers was observed for most medical disciplines, with Epidemiology showing the most remarkable upsurge.N=2,715 students from eleven different German-speaking faculties participated in the survey. Respondents were mostly positive towards online lectures, which were perceived as clearly beneficial, allowing for more time and flexibility. On the other hand, the suspension of practical lessons and alleged communicational and organizational shortcomings were seen as the main disadvantages. 28% of the students did not perceive negative impacts on their emotional state regarding their studies, however, 20% of the surveyed students found it difficult to cope with the lack of social contacts, with an additional 8% of them claiming to feel lonely, demotivated or abandoned.Conclusion: Overall, PT performance improved during the pandemic. Students see advantages in online lectures, but disadvantages in the cancellation of practical lectures; they miss their former social interactions and some even show signs of emotional distress.

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Characterizing Emotional State Transitions During Prolonged Use of a Mindfulness and Meditation App: An Observational Study (Preprint)

10.2196/preprints.19832 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Argus Athanas ◽

Jamison McCorrison ◽

Julie Campiston ◽

Nick Bender ◽

Jamie Price ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Mental Health ◽

Health Care ◽

Mental Health Care ◽

Access To Health Care ◽

Emotional State ◽

Favorable Effect ◽

State Transitions ◽

Emotional States ◽

Digital Device ◽

Mixed Effect

BACKGROUND The increasing demand for mental health care, shortages in mental healthcare providers, and unequal access to health care generally has created a need for innovative approaches to mental health care. Digital device apps – including ‘digital therapeutics’ – that provide recommendations and feedback for dealing with stress, depression, and other mental health issues, can be used to adjust mood and show promise for helping meet this demand. In addition, the recommendations delivered through such apps can also be tailored to an individual’s needs (i.e., personalized) and thereby potentially provide greater benefits than traditional ‘one-size-fits-all’ recommendations. OBJECTIVE We sought to characterize individual transitions from one emotional state to another during the prolonged use of a digital app designed to provide a user with guided meditations based on their initial, potentially negative, emotional state. Understanding the factors that mediate such transitions can lead to improved recommendations for specific mindfulness and meditation interventions or activities (MMAs) provided in a mental health app. METHODS We analyzed data collected during the use of the Stop, Breathe and Think (SBT) mindfulness app. The SBT app prompts users to input their emotional state prior to, and immediately after, engaging with MMAs recommended by the app. Data were collected on more than 650,000 SBT users engaging in nearly 5 million MMAs. We limited the scope of our analysis to users with 10 or more MMA sessions that included at least 6 basal emotional state evaluations. Using clustering techniques, we grouped emotions recorded by individual users and then applied longitudinal mixed effect models to assess the effects that individual recommended MMAs had on transitions from one group of emotions to another. RESULTS We found that basal emotional states have a strong influence on transitions from one emotional state to another after MMA engagements. We also found that different MMAs impact these transitions, and many were effective in eliciting a healthy transition but only under certain conditions. In addition, we also observed gender and age effects on these transitions. CONCLUSIONS We find that the initial emotional state of an SBT app user has an impact on which SBT MMAs will have a favorable effect on their transition from one emotional state to another. Our results have implications for the design and use of guided mental health recommendations for digital device apps. CLINICALTRIAL

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Dissociation between emotional and endocrine responses preceding an academic examination in male medical students

Journal of Endocrinology ◽

10.1677/joe.0.1070163 ◽

1985 ◽

Vol 107 (2) ◽

pp. 163-170 ◽

Cited By ~ 35

Author(s):

P. I. M. Allen ◽

K. A. Batty ◽

C. A. S. Dodd ◽

J. Herbert ◽

C. J. Hugh ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Medical Students ◽

Emotional State ◽

Serum Levels ◽

Stressful Event ◽

Emotional States ◽

Examination Period ◽

Consistent Change ◽

Emotional Changes ◽

Made In ◽

University Examination

ABSTRACT A study was made in 2 consecutive years of the emotional states and morning and afternoon serum levels of prolactin, cortisol and testosterone of male medical students during a 4- to 5-week period preceding a major university examination. 'Distress', 'anxiety' and, to a lesser degree, 'depression' increased during the 2 weeks immediately preceding the examination and were positively correlated with personality anxiety or neuroticism traits. Group means for hormones showed no consistent change over the same period. Neither was there evidence for a correlation between endocrine and emotional changes within individual students during the pre-examination period. A restricted study showed that there were significant increments in cortisol in samples taken during the examination itself. Changes in emotional state before an examination occurred in the absence of equally dramatic changes in levels of the three hormones studied, though this relationship may have altered during the examination itself. This suggests that the factors controlling the two categories of response may relate differently, in some way, to the imminence of this stressful event. J. Endocr. (1985) 107, 163–170

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Эмотивные глаголы в калмыцком героическом эпосе «Джангар»

BULLETIN OF THE KALMYK INSTITUTE FOR HUMANITIES OF THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ◽

10.22162/2619-0990-2020-50-4-1103-1120 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 1103-1120

Author(s):

Nina M. Mulaeva ◽

Keyword(s):

Emotional State ◽

Well Being ◽

The State ◽

Fear Of Failure ◽

Emotional States ◽

Short Term ◽

Basic Emotions ◽

Physical Manifestation ◽

Cultural Features

Introduction. In modern linguistics much attention is paid to the study of national/cultural features of functioning and semantics of emotive vocabulary. Still, Kalmyk emotive vocabulary has been no subject to any special research. Goals. The paper seeks to identify and classify lexicalsemantic groups of emotive verbs in texts of the Jangar epic, analyze functioning patterns of verbs denoting ‘basic’ emotions, namely: joy (Kalm. җирһх ‘be happy blissful’, байрлх ‘rejoice’), fear (әәх ‘be afraid, frightened, have a dread of, fear’, ичх ‘be ashamed, embarrassed’), and one verb of external (physical) manifestation of emotions (инәх ‘laugh’). Materials. The study analyzes emotive verbs traced in 28 Jangar texts recorded at different times (occasions) and either included in repertory cycles or once recited as separate songs. Results. The study reveals emotive verbs of the epic can be divided into six lexical and semantic groups. So, ‘verbs of negative emotional states’ are more frequently used than ‘verbs of positive emotional states’. The latter are represented by two verbs, the verb җирһх definitely dominates throughout narratives examined, reflecting the state of utmost happiness that consists in peace, tranquility and well-being of the blessed Bumba in general; the verb байрлх is used to denote the short-term emotional state of joy of a particular character. As for ‘verbs of negative emotional states’, the verb әәх prevails in frequency. And it is revealed that the emotion of fear may occur for a number of reasons as follows: fear of failure to execute an order of the Bogdo; fear of breaking an oath; fear of name shaming. The paper observes only scarce cases of the use of verbs naming emotions of sadness (энлх), embarrassment (эмәх), and vexation (һундх). The analyzed epic texts contain no emotive verbs that belong to semantic groups of fascination, love and hatred, worship or self-abasement.

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Association Between Improvement in Baseline Mood and Long-Term Use of a Mindfulness and Meditation App: Observational Study (Preprint)

10.2196/preprints.28132 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

UCSD Athanas

Keyword(s):

Mental Health ◽

Health Care ◽

Mental Health Care ◽

Health Care Providers ◽

Emotional State ◽

Favorable Effect ◽

Emotional States ◽

Care Providers ◽

Digital Device ◽

Mixed Effect

UNSTRUCTURED Background: The increasing demand for mental health care, a lack of mental health care providers, and unequal access to mental health care has created a need for innovative approaches to mental health care. Digital device apps, including digital therapeutics, that provide recommendations and feedback for dealing with stress, depression, and other mental health issues can be used to adjust mood and ultimately show promise for helping meet this demand. In addition, the recommendations delivered through such apps can also be tailored to an individual’s needs (ie, personalized) and thereby potentially provide greater benefits than traditional “one-size-fits-all” recommendations. Objective: This study aims to characterize individual transitions from one emotional state to another during the prolonged use of a digital app designed to provide a user with guided meditations based on their initial, potentially negative, emotional state. Understanding the factors that mediate such transitions can lead to improved recommendations for specific mindfulness and meditation interventions or activities (MMAs) provided in mental health apps. Methods: We analyzed data collected during the use of the Stop, Breathe, and Think (SBT) mindfulness app. The SBT app prompts users to input their emotional state before, and immediately after, engaging with MMAs recommended by the app. Data were collected from more than 650,000 SBT users engaging in nearly 5 million MMAs. We limited the scope of our analysis to users with 10 or more MMA sessions that included at least 6 basal emotional state evaluations. Using clustering techniques, we grouped emotions recorded by individual users and then applied longitudinal mixed effect models to assess the associations between individual recommended MMAs and transitions from one group of emotions to another. Results: We found that basal emotional states have a strong influence on transitions from one emotional state to another after MMA engagement. We also found that different MMAs impact these transitions and many were effective in eliciting a healthy transition but only under certain conditions. In addition, we observed gender and age effects on these transitions. Conclusions: We found that the initial emotional state of an SBT app user determines the type of SBT MMAs that will have a favorable effect on their transition from one emotional state to another. Our results have implications for the design and use of guided mental health recommendations for digital device apps. Keywords mental health; mobile apps; smartphone; emotional distress; mindfulness

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Effect of Emotions in a Lexical Decision Task

Swiss Journal of Psychology ◽

10.1024/1421-0185/a000193 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 76 (2) ◽

pp. 71-79 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Hélène Maire ◽

Renaud Brochard ◽

Jean-Luc Kop ◽

Vivien Dioux ◽

Daniel Zagar

Keyword(s):

Lexical Decision ◽

Lexical Decision Task ◽

Emotional State ◽

Control Group ◽

Decision Task ◽

Attentional Orienting ◽

Emotional States ◽

Sequence Effect ◽

Emotion Induction ◽

Before And After

Abstract. This study measured the effect of emotional states on lexical decision task performance and investigated which underlying components (physiological, attentional orienting, executive, lexical, and/or strategic) are affected. We did this by assessing participants’ performance on a lexical decision task, which they completed before and after an emotional state induction task. The sequence effect, usually produced when participants repeat a task, was significantly smaller in participants who had received one of the three emotion inductions (happiness, sadness, embarrassment) than in control group participants (neutral induction). Using the diffusion model ( Ratcliff, 1978 ) to resolve the data into meaningful parameters that correspond to specific psychological components, we found that emotion induction only modulated the parameter reflecting the physiological and/or attentional orienting components, whereas the executive, lexical, and strategic components were not altered. These results suggest that emotional states have an impact on the low-level mechanisms underlying mental chronometric tasks.

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Dogs can infer implicit information from human emotional expressions

Animal Cognition ◽

10.1007/s10071-021-01544-x ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Natalia Albuquerque ◽

Daniel S. Mills ◽

Kun Guo ◽

Anna Wilkinson ◽

Briseida Resende

Keyword(s):

Emotional State ◽

Food Resource ◽

Emotional Expressions ◽

Emotional States ◽

Emotional Information ◽

Implicit Information ◽

Emotional Display ◽

Affective Information ◽

Social Decision Making ◽

Current Behaviour

AbstractThe ability to infer emotional states and their wider consequences requires the establishment of relationships between the emotional display and subsequent actions. These abilities, together with the use of emotional information from others in social decision making, are cognitively demanding and require inferential skills that extend beyond the immediate perception of the current behaviour of another individual. They may include predictions of the significance of the emotional states being expressed. These abilities were previously believed to be exclusive to primates. In this study, we presented adult domestic dogs with a social interaction between two unfamiliar people, which could be positive, negative or neutral. After passively witnessing the actors engaging silently with each other and with the environment, dogs were given the opportunity to approach a food resource that varied in accessibility. We found that the available emotional information was more relevant than the motivation of the actors (i.e. giving something or receiving something) in predicting the dogs’ responses. Thus, dogs were able to access implicit information from the actors’ emotional states and appropriately use the affective information to make context-dependent decisions. The findings demonstrate that a non-human animal can actively acquire information from emotional expressions, infer some form of emotional state and use this functionally to make decisions.

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An experimental study on the effect of emotion lines in comics

Semiotica ◽

10.1515/sem-2019-0079 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 0 (0) ◽

Author(s):

Amitash Ojha ◽

Charles Forceville ◽

Bipin Indurkhya

Keyword(s):

Experimental Study ◽

Emotional State ◽

Negative Emotions ◽

Emotional States ◽

One To One

Abstract Both mainstream and art comics often use various flourishes surrounding characters’ heads. These so-called “pictorial runes” (also called “emanata”) help convey the emotional states of the characters. In this paper, using (manipulated) panels from Western and Indian comic albums as well as neutral emoticons and basic shapes in different colors, we focus on the following two issues: (a) whether runes increase the awareness in comics readers about the emotional state of the character; and (b) whether a correspondence can be found between the types of runes (twirls, spirals, droplets, and spikes) and specific emotions. Our results show that runes help communicate emotion. Although no one-to-one correspondence was found between the tested runes and specific emotions, it was found that droplets and spikes indicate generic emotions, spirals indicate negative emotions, and twirls indicate confusion and dizziness.

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Using psychopharmacology in the treatment of problem behaviours in dogs and cats

Companion Animal ◽

10.12968/coan.2021.0032 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 26 (9) ◽

pp. 1-10

Author(s):

Caroline Elizabeth Warnes

Keyword(s):

Emotional States ◽

Short Term ◽

Behaviour Modification ◽

Active Medication ◽

Problem Behaviours ◽

Fear And Anxiety ◽

The Uk

Behaviourally-active medication can play an important role in improving the welfare of cats and dogs in both the short and longer term. Drugs can be used to reduce fear, anxiety and panic in the short term, such as to help noise-sensitive dogs cope better with events such as firework displays, or to help fearful dogs and cats cope better with visits to the vets or groomers. Drugs can also play an important role in longer-term reduction of negative emotional states, particularly fear and anxiety, as long as they are used in conjunction with a comprehensive behaviour modification plan. This article outlines some of the behaviourally-active drugs most commonly used to treat dogs and cats in the UK, as well as some of the considerations needed for using medication as part of behaviour modification in cats and dogs.

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Exposure to and recall of violence reduce short-term memory and cognitive control

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ◽

10.1073/pnas.1704651114 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 114 (32) ◽

pp. 8505-8510 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Francesco Bogliacino ◽

Gianluca Grimalda ◽

Pietro Ortoleva ◽

Patrick Ring

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Control ◽

Cognitive Functions ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

Exposure To Violence ◽

Well Being ◽

Emotional States ◽

Long Term Effects ◽

Short Term ◽

Urban District ◽

Term Memory

Previous research has investigated the effects of violence and warfare on individuals' well-being, mental health, and individual prosociality and risk aversion. This study establishes the short- and long-term effects of exposure to violence on short-term memory and aspects of cognitive control. Short-term memory is the ability to store information. Cognitive control is the capacity to exert inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Both have been shown to affect positively individual well-being and societal development. We sampled Colombian civilians who were exposed either to urban violence or to warfare more than a decade earlier. We assessed exposure to violence through either the urban district-level homicide rate or self-reported measures. Before undertaking cognitive tests, a randomly selected subset of our sample was asked to recall emotions of anxiety and fear connected to experiences of violence, whereas the rest recalled joyful or emotionally neutral experiences. We found that higher exposure to violence was associated with lower short-term memory abilities and lower cognitive control in the group recalling experiences of violence, whereas it had no effect in the other group. This finding demonstrates that exposure to violence, even if a decade earlier, can hamper cognitive functions, but only among individuals actively recalling emotional states linked with such experiences. A laboratory experiment conducted in Germany aimed to separate the effect of recalling violent events from the effect of emotions of fear and anxiety. Both factors had significant negative effects on cognitive functions and appeared to be independent from each other.

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The role of emotional service in the restaurant business

Vestnik Universiteta ◽

10.26425/1816-4277-2021-11-164-167 ◽

2022 ◽

pp. 164-167

Author(s):

N. A. Ofitserova

Keyword(s):

Emotional Intelligence ◽

Customer Satisfaction ◽

Emotional Labor ◽

Work Performance ◽

Positive Emotions ◽

Emotional State ◽

Communicative Competence ◽

Point Of View ◽

Emotional States

The article considers the restaurant business from the point of view of not only the entrepreneurial aspect, but also the service aspect, which is fundamental. The reasons why people visit restaurants have been revealed. In addition to physical need, restaurants are an element of cognition and a way of experiencing positive emotions. The importance of the restaurant business in shaping people’s positive emotional state has been formulated. Two forms of emotional labor of an employee and the influence of emotional states on work performance have been highlighted. The role of emotional intelligence and communicative competence in customer satisfaction with a restaurant visit has been determined. The importance of developing emotional intelligence has been concluded. Recommendations for its development has been formulated.

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