How Mindfulness and Acceptance Could Help Psychiatrists Predict Alexithymia Among Students.

ABSTRACT: Mindfulness and acceptance have demonstrated associations with alexithymia facets. As a very limited body of research has explored the predictive strength among alexithymia-related constructs, this study aimed to investigate the prediction of alexithymia based on acceptance and mindfulness among students. The study group consisted of 586 university students, 237 (40.9%) females and 349 (59.1%) males. As for data collection, the five-factor mindfulness questionnaire, Acceptance and Commitment Questionnaire, and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-2 were applied. A stepwise multiple linear regression was calculated to predict alexithymia based on components of commitment and action, mindfulness facets, and demographic variables (F[5,578] = 77.26, p ≤ 0.001), with an R2 of 0.41. The predictive variables including description (B = -0.59, t = -8.02, p < 0.001), commitment and action (B = -0.13, t = -4.38, p < 0.001), observation (B = -0.15, t = -2.94, p < 0.01), and no judgment (B = -0.16, t = -2.56, p < 0.05) exhibited significant prediction effects on the adjusted index of alexithymia. The findings contribute to the potential mechanism between mindfulness and alexithymia in intervention that seeks to improve mindfulness and acceptance skills and could prove more effective in treating patients with alexithymia.

How Resiliency and Hope Can Predict Stress of Covid-19 by Mediating Role of Spiritual Well-being Based on Machine Learning.

Nowadays, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing a tremendous role in all aspects of human life and they have the remarkable potential to solve many problems that classic sciences are unable to solve appropriately. Neuroscience and especially psychiatry is one of the most important fields that can use the potential of AI and ML. This study aims to develop an ML-based model to detect the relationship between resiliency and hope with the stress of COVID-19 by mediating the role of spiritual well-being. An online survey is conducted to assess the psychological responses of Iranian people during the Covid-19 outbreak in the period between March 15 and May 20, 2020, in Iran. The Iranian public was encouraged to take part in an online survey promoted by Internet ads, e-mails, forums, social networks, and short message service (SMS) programs. As a whole, 755 people participated in this study. Sociodemographic characteristics of the participants, The Resilience Scale, The Adult Hope Scale, Paloutzian & Ellison's Spiritual Wellbeing Scale, and Stress of Covid-19 Scale were used to gather data. The findings showed that spiritual well-being itself cannot predict stress of Covid-19 alone, and in fact, someone who has high spiritual well-being does not necessarily have a small amount of stress, and this variable, along with hope and resiliency, can be a good predictor of stress. Our extensive research indicated that traditional analytical and statistical methods are unable to correctly predict related Covid-19 outbreak factors, especially stress when benchmarked with our proposed ML-based model which can accurately capture the nonlinear relationships between the collected data variables.

Predicting hallucination proneness based on mindfulness in university students: the mediating role of mental distress.

As a risk factor of hallucination proneness, the level of mindfulness has not yet been investigated in non-clinical participants. Other potential mediators, such as mental distress (depression, anxiety, and stress) which contribute to hallucination proneness also need to be assessed. This study investigated the mediating effect of mental distress in predicting hallucination proneness based on mindfulness. A number of 168 Iranian university students completed three questionnaires: (1) the five-facet mindfulness questionnaire, (2) the depression, anxiety and stress scale; and (3) the revised hallucination scale. The results showed that there was a significant association between levels of mindfulness and hallucination proneness. Mental distress has a significant effect on four facets of mindfulness questionnaire and an insignificant effect on one facet (awareness) in predicting hallucination. These effects were both direct and indirect. The indirect effect was developed by the mediating role of mental distress.