Mindfulness, Meditation, and Belief in Free Will/Determinism

Does Servant Leadership Control Psychological Distress in Crisis? Moderation and Mediation Mechanism

Purpose

This study aims to investigate the impact of servant leadership on the psychological distress of healthcare staff during the Covid-19 crisis. The authors propose that work engagement mediates and mindfulness moderates the direct relationship between servant leadership and psychological distress.

Methods

Time-lagged data were collected from 277 healthcare staff working at different hospitals in Pakistan. Process Macro version 3.1 on SPSS 23 was used for statistical analysis. For model fitness, we used AMOS V 22.

Results

The results show that servant leadership is negatively related to psychological distress. Furthermore, work engagement mediates the relationship between servant leadership and psychological distress. Moreover, mindfulness is anticipated to moderate the direct relationship between servant leadership and psychological distress, drawing on the social exchange and conservation of resources theory.

Discussion

This study finds that servant leadership is vital for the mental health of healthcare staff. Thus, it extends the utility of the concept of servant leadership to the psychology and crisis management literature.

Body-mind relaxation meditation modulates the thalamocortical functional connectivity in major depressive disorder: a preliminary resting-state fMRI study

Mindfulness-based interventions such as meditation have increasingly been utilized for the treatment of psychological disorders and have been shown to be effective in the treatment of depression and relapse prevention. However, it remains largely unclear the neural mechanism of the therapeutic effects of meditation among depressed individuals. In this study, we investigated how body-mind relaxation meditation (BMRM) can modulate the thalamocortical functional connectivity (FC) in major depressive disorder patients and healthy controls. In the present study, we recruited 21 medication-naive adolescents with major depressive disorder (MDDs) and 24 matched healthy controls (HCs). We designed an audio recording to induce body-mind relaxation meditation. Resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) scans were collected before and after the BMRM intervention in both groups. The thalamus subregions were defined according to the Human Brainnetome Atlas, and functional connectivity (FC) was measured and compared to find brain regions that were affected by the BMRM intervention. Before the BMRM intervention, MDDs showed reduced FC of the bilateral precuneus/post cingulate cortex with the left posterior parietal thalamus and left caudal temporal thalamus, as well as an increased FC of the left occipital thalamus with the left medial frontal cortex. Moreover, aberrant FCs in MDDs at baseline were normalized following the BMRM intervention. After the BMRM intervention, both MDDs and HCs showed decreased FC between the left rostral temporal thalamus and the left inferior occipital. Given the small sample used in this study, future studies are warranted to evaluate the generalizability of these findings. Our findings suggest that BMRM is associated with changes in thalamocortical functional connectivity in MDDs. BMRM may act by strengthening connections between the thalamus and the default mode network, which are involved in a variety of high-level functioning, such as attention and self-related processes.