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Aim Given the prolongation of the newly emerging COVID-19 pandemic and the significance of caring for the patients by nursing staff, investigating and planning for the different psychological dimensions of this group is of paramount importance. Hence, this study investigated the role of spiritual intelligence in predicting nurses' empathizing with COVID-19 patients. Methods This descriptive-correlation study was conducted in 2021 on nurses caring for COVID-19 patients in three public hospitals. The researchers used two standard questionnaires, including the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) and Spiritual Intelligence (SI), for data collection. The collected data were analyzed in SPSS16 using descriptive statistics and the following: The Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal–Wallis test, Regression, chi-square test, and Pearson and Spearman correlations. Results The statistical population consisted of 338 nurses with an average age of 34 and ten years of work experience. There was a significant positive relationship between the empathy scores and spiritual intelligence scores of the nurses caring for COVID-19 patients (P<0.05). It was also concluded from the regression analysis that, spiritual intelligence affect empathy. Mean score of empathy was higher in hospitals where more nursing staff had MSc degrees. There was a significant difference between the empathy scores of the three hospitals (P<0.05). Conclusion The results indicated that there is a positive relationship between empathy and spiritual intelligence. Therefor improving spiritual intelligence is the appropriate strategy to ameliorate empathy during the COVID19 pandemic. At the same time, study indicated attention to the issue of nurses' mental health. Hence, it was suggested to incorporate these issues in the training programs and national/international decisions.

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of 12-week aerobic exercises on self-esteem, social desirability and rate of mental health in male students of Payam Noor University (PNU). Basic procedures. For this reason we used male college students (n = 80, age = 22 ± 2. 1) who did not do any sport. They were randomly assigned to experimental (n = 40) and control (n = 40) groups, after having been selected via stratified random sampling among students of Ahvaz Payam Noor University. Also, to collect data there were implemented the Cooper test and the general health questionnaire of Goldberg (GHQ) and social desirability questionnaire of Crowne-Marlowe. Main findings. Statistical analysis showed that training like aerobic exercises is related to a significant improvement in mental health, self-esteem and social desirability because of favorable changes in some of physiological and psychological parameters. Conclusions. This study was of a semi-experimental type (pre-test, post-test). Data analyzed by Multivariate Analysis Of Variance (MANOVA) at p value ( p = 0.05) revealed that there were significant differences between experimental group and control group, in mental health, self-esteem and social desirability.