The rise of mindfulness and its resonance with the Islamic tradition

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Mindfulness-based interventions have grown in prominence over the past decade. Evidence of their efficacy has been an important driver of their widespread acceptance and proliferation. Although secularised, these mindfulness-based interventions are derived from and influenced by Eastern spiritual traditions, particularly Buddhism. For this reason, there is a need to explore the acceptability of such approaches among individuals firmly committed to theistic traditions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This article examines the rise of mindfulness-based interventions, exploring the sparse literature concerning the acceptability of such approaches among individuals with theistic perspectives divergent from both secular worldviews and Buddhist narratives. Finally, the article proposes several bridging concepts that might help practitioners of mindfulness-based approaches communicate key aspects of these interventions in a manner more culturally attuned and religiously resonant with the worldviews of Muslim clients

Religiosity: Reducing Depressive Symptoms Amongst Muslim Females in the United Arab Emirates

Religiosity has previously been associated with greater wellbeing, as well as with lower rates of depressive disorders and less severe levels of depressive symptoms. Relatively few studies however, have explored this association in Muslim populations. The present study explores the relationship between religiosity and depressive symptoms amongst female citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Using a cross-sectional correlational design, a convenience sample of college students (N = 459) completed the Religious Conviction Inventory (RCI-10), adapted to the Islamic context, along with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II). Both instruments demonstrated good psychometric properties and as hypothesized, religiosity was negatively correlated with depressive symptoms. Further, individuals categorized as experiencing severe depressive symptoms reported significantly lower levels of religiosity, compared to their asymptomatic counterparts. These findings lend further support to the idea that religiosity may act as a resilience-factor in the context of depression, extending this idea to female citizens of the United Arab Emirates. The findings of this study are understood in the context of the second wave of positive psychology, called PP 2.0, which looks at positive and negative factors in individual\u27s lives as both interact to produce positive clinical outcomes

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe