Emotional experiences and psychological well-being in 51 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents challenges to psychological well-being, but how can we predict when people suffer or cope during sustained stress? Here, we test the prediction that specific types of momentary emotional experiences are differently linked to psychological well-being during the pandemic. Study 1 used survey data collected from 24,221 participants in 51 countries during the COVID-19 outbreak. We show that, across countries, well-being is linked to individuals' recent emotional experiences, including calm, hope, anxiety, loneliness, and sadness. Consistent results are found in two age, sex, and ethnicity-representative samples in the United Kingdom (n = 971) and the United States (n = 961) with preregistered analyses (Study 2). A prospective 30-day daily diary study conducted in the United Kingdom (n = 110) confirms the key role of these five emotions and demonstrates that emotional experiences precede changes in well-being (Study 3). Our findings highlight differential relationships between specific types of momentary emotional experiences and well-being and point to the cultivation of calm and hope as candidate routes for well-being interventions during periods of sustained stress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A Mobile-Assisted Peer Assessment Approach for Evidence-Based Nursing Education.

Students who learn evidence-based nursing can assist the healthcare team to make proper medical decisions and provide patients with valuable advice, thus optimizing the quality of patient care in specific situations. In clinical work, nursing staff members participate in decision making by searching for relevant empirical nursing literature, a basic ability required to enter clinical practice. In traditional instruction, nursing students are taught the Problem, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome method to learn to use library resources and gather empirical nursing knowledge for decision making. However, it is a challenge for most students to have sufficient practice to make decisions correctly and to have opportunities to perceive medical cases from diverse perspectives. Therefore, we propose a peer assessment-based Problem, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome approach to help nursing students locate correct evidence and make appropriate decisions about patient care. We performed an experiment with our approach in a nursing university training program. The experimental results reveal that the subjects learning with the proposed approach show better evidence-based nursing knowledge, learning attitude, and critical thinking ability than those learning with the traditional approach.

Statin Use and the Risk of Prostate Cancer in Ischemic Heart Disease Patients in Taiwan.

Patients with ischemic heart disease (IHD) are more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer. Statins, which are widely used in such patients, are shown to modify the risk of prostate cancer. To clarify the association between statin use and the risk of prostate cancer among patients with higher risk of developing prostate cancer in Taiwan, a cohort of 26,628 men with IHD and aged between 55 and 100 were acquired from the National Health Insurance Research Database and followed over a period of 8 years. The risk of prostate cancer was calculated by time-dependent Cox regression model. Statin use was associated with significantly lower risk of both total and advanced prostate cancer (adjusted hazard ratio (HR): 0.719, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.570-0.908; adjusted HR: 0.718, 95% CI: 0.530-0.972 respectively). In Taiwan IHD population, the reduction in risk of prostate cancer was observed in statin users as compared with nonusers.

Effectiveness of a combination of ezetimibe and statins in patients with acute coronary syndrome and multiple comorbidities: A 6-year population-based cohort study.

BACKGROUND: The clinical benefits of a combination of statins and ezetimibe in patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) were observed in a clinical trial. However, little is known regarding the effectiveness of using statins with or without ezetimibe in patients with ACS and multiple comorbidities in real-world clinical practice. METHODS: This is a nationwide population-based cohort study using Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database. A total of 212,110 patients with ACS who had been discharged after their first ACS events between 2006 and 2010 were enrolled. A propensity score matching approach was used to create matched cohorts for adjusting potential confounders. Cox proportional hazards regressions were performed to estimate the risk of re-hospitalization for ACS and revascularization. RESULTS: Patients in the statins-plus-ezetimibe group had a significantly lower risk of re-hospitalization for ACS (adjusted hazard ratio [HR]=0.64, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.60-0.69) and revascularization (HR=0.69, 95% CI: 0.63-0.76) than those in the statins-alone group. In the statins-plus-ezetimibe group, female patients had a lower risk of re-hospitalization for ACS than male patients did, and patients without diabetes mellitus had a lower risk of re-hospitalization for ACS than did patients with diabetes mellitus. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with ACS and multiple comorbidities receiving a combination therapy of statins and ezetimibe had a lower risk of re-hospitalization for ACS and revascularization than those receiving statins alone. Significant interaction effects were observed between combination with ezetimibe, sex, and diabetes mellitus.

Effect of decision load on whole-display superiority in change detection.

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) refers to our ability in remembering visual information for a limited amount of time. In the VSTM literature, mixed findings have been reported regarding whether items are encoded individually or globally in the context of other items. This study adopted a color change detection task and manipulated color and spatial relations of the items on display to test whether inter-item relational information and processing can facilitate change detection performance. Results showed that only when a post-cue was presented to reduce decision load (Experiments 1 and 3), both color and spatial relations facilitated color change detection. However, when there was no post-cue to lessen the decision load, preserving spatial relations at test impaired color change detection (Experiment 2). Furthermore, spatial and color relational processing interactively affected color change detection. Benefit of the spatial relations was observed only when color grouping cues can aid change detection, and the utilization of color relations was optimized when spatial relations were preserved to cue the retrieval of color relations. Our results support the hierarchical representation hypothesis, which assumes that both individual items and item relations are encoded and maintained in VSTM. The amount of cognitive resources for retrieving different levels of representations is highly constrained by the decision load.