Compassionate mind training and its relationship with perceived stress, poor mental health, self-compassion and benevolence

Background: University students and employees are two populations where stress-related problems, anxiety, and depression are increasing. Interventions must be found to reverse this trajectory and to improve mental health. Research on self-compassion and compassion training as a strategy to handle high levels of perceived stress, depression, and anxiety has increased internationally during the last years. Accessibility to new effective health programs is important to spur the development within this field of psychology and mental health forward. Further, testing different delivery formats is important both in regard to accessibility as well as cost and time efficiency. Aims: The purpose of this thesis was to develop a compassionate mind training intervention and examine its effects on mental health and stress-related problems in two groups of adults (university students and employees). Furthermore, the prosocial concept of benevolence was measured to increase the understanding of the concept and its relation to self-compassion, anxiety, depression, perceived stress, and emotional exhaustion. Four studies were performed. The aim of the first study was to evaluate the effects of compassionate mind training on stress-related problems in university students compared with affect-focused training. Study II’s aim was to evaluate the effect of compassionate mind training provided by a digital mental health solution using a smartphone application on stress-related problems in university students compared with an active control group following a mindfulness program using a smartphone application and a passive waitlist control group, respectively. In study III, the aim was to evaluate the effect of compassionate mind training on stress-related problems among employees in two work organizations compared with physical exercise. Study IV investigated the associations between the psychological concepts of benevolence and stress, mental ill-health, and self-compassion among employees. Study I: Comparing the effects of compassionate mind training to an affect-focused training on university students with self-defined high levels of stress. Study II: Comparing the effects of digital compassionate mind training to an active control consisting of digital mindfulness training and a passive waitlist control on university students with stress-related problems. Study III: Comparing the effects of compassionate mind training to physical exercise on employees with self-defined high perceived stress in two organizations. Study IV: Investigating the associations between the psychological concept of benevolence and perceived stress, mental ill-health (e.g., emotional exhaustion, anxiety, and depression symptoms), satisfaction with life, and self-compassion among employees in two datasets. Methods: A compassionate mind training program was developed and evaluated in randomized controlled trials (studies I, II and III) and the data were analyzed by mixed effects models. Study IV used a cross-sectional design. An informed consent form was filled out by all participants in each study. Study I included 55 Swedish university students (mean age = 26) randomized to compassionate mind training (n = 28) and affect-focused training (n = 27). Assessment was done at pre- and posttraining evaluating participants’ self-reports on a self-compassion scale short form (SCS-SF), hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS), and perceived stress scale (PSS-14). Mixed-effects regression models were used to analyze data. Study II included 57 Swedish university students (mean age = 25) who were randomized to digitally provided digital compassionate mind training (n = 23), digital mindfulness training (n = 19), and a waitlist (n = 15). The primary outcomes involved the perceived stress scale (PSS-10) and self-compassion scale short-form (SCS-SF), and secondary outcomes involved the Toronto alexithymia scale (TAS-20) and the clinical outcomes in routine evaluation-outcome measure (CORE-OM). Data were analyzed with multilevel growth models that provide advantages when analyzing repeated measures data from randomized between-group design. Study III included 49 employees from two work organizations who were randomized to compassionate mind training (n = 25) and physical exercise (n = 24). The participants filled in a self-report on the self-compassion scale (SCS), the perceived stress scale (PSS-14), the hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS) and the satisfaction with life scale (SWLS). Mixed-effect growth models were applied to analyze the data. Study IV consisted of two cross sectional studies including 571 employees based on two dataset from five work organizations and examined the association between a new measure of the concept of a benevolence scale (BS) and self-report measures of a perceived stress scale (PSS-14) and emotional exhaustion (MBI-EE), symptom checklist, core depression subscale (SCL-CD6), The hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS), the self- compassion scale (SCS), and the satisfaction with life scale (SWLS). Data were analyzed using bivariate Pearson r correlations. Results: The results of study I showed that compassionate mind training and the affect- focused training did differ significantly on the outcome measures of depression (p = 0.02) but not on the other measures of self-compassion, perceived stress, and anxiety. Study II found no significant effects between the mindfulness group and the compassionate mind training group. However, both digitally provided compassionate mind training and mindfulness training increased self‐compassion (p < 0.001) and decreased alexithymia (p = 0.01), respectively, compared to the waitlist. Only compassionate mind training significantly reduced stress (p = 0.027) compared to waitlist. No significant effect was found on global psychological distress (p = 0.227) in any of the groups. Results of study III showed that compassionate mind training and the physical exercise did differ significantly on the outcome measure of self-compassion (p = 0.03) but not on any of the other measures: perceived stress, anxiety, depression, and satisfaction with life. In study IV, results showed that benevolence was significantly and negatively correlated with perceived stress (r = −0.392), depression symptoms checklist (r = −0.190) depression correlated with self-compassion (0.401). However, benevolence was not significantly associated with either satisfaction with life (r = 0.148) or anxiety (r = −0.199). Conclusions: Compassionate mind training delivered both in a group setting and using a smartphone application showed weak results in the included studies. Reasons for this could depend on various factors such as low statistical power due to small group sizes, or that the compassionate mind training intervention is not an effective method compared to the active control groups: affect-focused training, mindfulness, or physical exercise. The results could also depend on low baseline values on the outcome measures which does not give room for improvements. It shows that compassionate mind training can be effective using a smartphone to train self-compassion and decrease perceived stress, anxiety and depression symptoms compared to a waitlist. It was observed that self-assessed benevolence was symptoms (r = −0.310) emotional exhaustion (r = - −0.295) and significantly and positively associated weakly with emotional exhaustion and depression, and moderate associated with perceived stress and self-compassion but the finding have low statistical value due to the cross-sectional design. The compassionate mind training studied in the current thesis showed minimal or no effects on mental health measured as perceived stress, anxiety, depression, and self-compassion on the populations of university students and employees. More robust studies need to be conducted with larger samples. Future studies should preregister the plan for statistical analysis and have a careful screening procedure of the participants as well as a strategy for adherence to prevent and avoid attrition. Also, long-term follow up and mixed-method studies are needed to further evaluate the impact of compassionate mind training, investigating when, how, and for whom compassionate mind training is beneficial, as well as the role of benevolence in stress, mental health, and self-compassion

Value creation- How can companies optimize the human capital

The thesis aims to examine how companies optimize the human capital from a value creation perspective. The value creation will be related to transfer of knowledge, recruitment, staff turnover and development. The thesis has a deductive approach and six qualitative interviews have been conducted. The results from the interviews will be strengthened with a quantitative data analysis of two measurements; value added per employee and human capital efficiency. The theoretical framework includes definitions of human capital. Theories regarding human capital investments and how to find and develop the human capital are presented. The relation between human and structural capital and theories regarding the measurements are presented. The empirical framework is based on data obtained from the interviews and from the companies’ annual reports. Our conclusion is that the optimization of the human capital is depending on the organisational capital. External recruitment and staff turnover can have an indirect affect while internal recruitment, development and transfer of knowledge can have a direct affect. The factors affect is managed and determined by the organisational capital that influences the optimization of the human capital

Manufacturing costs and Degree of Occupancy Based on the Principle of Characteristic Parts

In making capacity estimates and cost calculations in the manufacturing industry, many products and production systems are often involved, making the data in their totality difficult to grasp. Introducing the concept of the characteristic part, which is a fabricated part seen as representative of all parts produced in terms of demand, setup time, cycle time, average batch size and total number of batches involved, makes the calculations required much more manageable and much less time-consuming. The article takes up how the characteristic part is defined and how it can be used in calculating production capacity, system utilization and manufacturing costs

Effects of age of acquisition (AoA) and proficiency on processing of syntax in 6- to 8-year-old monolingual and bilingual children: an ERP study

Even though language proficiency in children is strongly related to success in almost all domains, neurocognitive studies of L2 processing are typically limited to adults with several years of exposure, who may use general cognitive mechanisms to compensate for any difficulties in L2 processing. For example, whereas previous studies of adult bilinguals have reported differences in the anterior negativity elicited by syntactic violations with delays in exposure to English of less than 3 years (Weber-Fox & Neville, 1996) a precursor to the anterior negativity has been reported in monolingual children as young as 2.5 years of age (Oberecker, et al., 2005). In the current ERP study, processing of English phrase structure was explored in 6- to 8-year old monolingual and bilingual children who acquired English as a second language around 4 years of age. Monolingual children of higher proficiency displayed relatively mature processing of phrase structure violations as indicated by a left anterior negativity over lateral sites and a posterior positivity. High-proficiency bilingual children tended to display a medial anterior negativity and a posterior positivity. The difference in distribution of the anterior effect across groups could only be explained by AoA. However, lower proficiency affected the posterior ERP effect and amplitude of the anterior effects in response to syntactic violations. These results suggest that the more automatic syntactic processing in children is affected by AoA while more controlled, metalinguistic processing may be related to language proficiency

Global Tumor RNA Expression in Early Establishment of Experimental Tumor Growth and Related Angiogenesis following Cox-Inhibition Evaluated by Microarray Analysis

Altered expression of COX-2 and overproduction of prostaglandins, particularly prostaglandin E2, are common in malignant tumors. Consequently, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) attenuate tumor net growth, tumor related cachexia, improve appetite and prolong survival. We have also reported that COX-inhibition (indomethacin) interfered with early onset of tumor endothelial cell growth, tumor cell proliferation and apoptosis. It is however still unclear whether such effects are restricted to metabolic alterations closely related to eicosanoid pathways and corresponding regulators, or whether a whole variety of gene products are involved both up- and downstream effects of eicosanoids. Therefore, present experiments were performed by the use of an in vivo, intravital chamber technique, where micro-tumor growth and related angiogenesis were analyzed by microarray to evaluate for changes in global RNA expression caused by indomethacin treatment

CLOCKWISE – Smarta lösningar till stöd för energieffektiva beteenden Slutrapport för forskningsprojekt 24, CERBOF 2:2 Beteende, processer och styrmedel

Människans beteende spelar en avgörande roll vid energibesparing och energieffektivisering. Interaktiv teknik har potential att visualisera energi och därmed göra användningen mera begriplig för gemene man. I projektet CLOCKWISE utrustades hushåll under en period med en prototyp, Energy Aware Clock, som ger en grafisk återgivning av hushållselen i realtid. Studien syftade till att undersöka prototypens inverkan på beteende både kvalitativt och kvantitativt. Teman för den kvalitativa studien var användningsmönster, medvetenhet om användningen av el samt nyttogörandet av återkoppling (feedback). I den kvantitativa delen har olika eldata och inomhustemperaturer loggats med fokus på minskning och temperatur variationer. Resultaten visar att hushållen har lärt sig om sin normala vardagsanvändning av el och de har upptäckt och kartlagt utrustning som drar mycket el. Under de tre månadernas testperiod har två tydliga faser identifierats, den första upptäckande och den andra bekräftande. Resultat från mätningar, projektets kvantitativa del, visar på hög komplexitet med många osäkerhetsfaktorer och gör det svårt att sammanfatta några säkra slutsatser. Trots rådande osäkerheter i underlaget finns indikationer på att de deltagande hushållen reducerat användningen av hushållsel med upp till ca 10%. Inomhustemperaturerna har inte påverkats under projektets gång. En koppling till utomhustemperaturen vid snabba förändringar kan dock iakttagas

DeepStay: Stay Region Extraction from Location Trajectories using Weak Supervision

Nowadays, mobile devices enable constant tracking of the user's position and location trajectories can be used to infer personal points of interest (POIs) like homes, workplaces, or stores. A common way to extract POIs is to first identify spatio-temporal regions where a user spends a significant amount of time, known as stay regions (SRs). Common approaches to SR extraction are evaluated either solely unsupervised or on a small-scale private dataset, as popular public datasets are unlabeled. Most of these methods rely on hand-crafted features or thresholds and do not learn beyond hyperparameter optimization. Therefore, we propose a weakly and self-supervised transformer-based model called DeepStay, which is trained on location trajectories to predict stay regions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach based on deep learning and the first approach that is evaluated on a public, labeled dataset. Our SR extraction method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we conducted a limited experiment on the task of transportation mode detection from GPS trajectories using the same architecture and achieved significantly higher scores than the state-of-the-art. Our code is available at https://github.com/christianll9/deepstay.Comment: Paper under peer revie

COX-2 gene expression in colon cancer tissue related to regulating factors and promoter methylation status

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Increased cyclooxygenase activity promotes progression of colorectal cancer, but the mechanisms behind COX-2 induction remain elusive. This study was therefore aimed to define external cell signaling and transcription factors relating to high COX-2 expression in colon cancer tissue.</p> <p>Method</p> <p>Tumor and normal colon tissue were collected at primary curative operation in 48 unselected patients. COX-2 expression in tumor and normal colon tissue was quantified including microarray analyses on tumor mRNA accounting for high and low tumor COX-2 expression. Cross hybridization was performed between tumor and normal colon tissue. Methylation status of up-stream COX-2 promoter region was evaluated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Tumors with high COX-2 expression displayed large differences in gene expression compared to normal colon. Numerous genes with altered expression appeared in tumors of high COX-2 expression compared to tumors of low COX-2. COX-2 expression in normal colon was increased in patients with tumors of high COX-2 compared to normal colon from patients with tumors of low COX-2. IL1β, IL6 and iNOS transcripts were up-regulated among external cell signaling factors; nine transcription factors (ATF3, C/EBP, c-Fos, Fos-B, JDP2, JunB, c-Maf, NF-κB, TCF4) showed increased expression and 5 (AP-2, CBP, Elk-1, p53, PEA3) were decreased in tumors with high COX-2. The promoter region of COX-2 gene did not show consistent methylation in tumor or normal colon tissue.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Transcription and external cell signaling factors are altered as covariates to COX-2 expression in colon cancer tissue, but DNA methylation of the COX-2 promoter region was not a significant factor behind COX-2 expression in tumor and normal colon tissue.</p