It is generally agreed that schizophrenia patients show a markedly reduced ability to perceive and express facial emotions. Previous studies have shown, however, that such deficits are emotion-specific in schizophrenia and not generalized. Three kinds of studies were examined: decoding studies dealing with schizophrenia patients' ability to perceive universally recognized facial expressions of emotions, encoding studies dealing with schizophrenia patients' ability to express certain facial emotions, and studies of subjective reactions of patients' sensitivity toward universally recognized facial expressions of emotions. A review of these studies shows that schizophrenia patients, despite a general impairment of perception or expression of facial emotions, are highly sensitive to certain negative emotions of fear and anger. These observations are discussed in the light of hemispheric theory, which accounts for a generalized performance deficit, and social-cognitive theory, which accounts for an emotion-specific deficit in schizophrenia.

The novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 that first emerged in Wuhan, China, in Nov-Dec 2019 has already impacted a significant proportion of the world population. Governments of many countries imposed quarantines and social distancing measures in 2020, many of which remain in place, to mitigate the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 virus causing the COVID-19 disease. The direct impact of COVID-19 on people infected with the virus, their families and the health care workers, as well as the impact of the mitigation measures such as quarantine, social distancing, and self-isolation on the rest of the population have contributed to a global mental health pandemic, including anxiety, depression, panic attacks, posttraumatic stress symptoms, psychosis, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and suicidality. These effects are present acutely (for example, due to fear of contamination or losing loved ones, effects of quarantine/isolation, withdrawal of community and social services, etc.) and may continue long after the pandemic is over (for example, due to bereavement, unemployment, financial losses, etc). The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered mental health problems in people without previous history of mental illness, as well as worsened the symptoms in those with pre-existing psychiatric diagnosis. Therefore, the global effort is called for to deal with this mental health pandemic secondary to COVID-19 itself to address the emergence of new as well as the exacerbation of the existing mental health issues. Conversely, this global context provides an extraordinary opportunity for studying individual differences in response to and resilience in the face of physical and psychological threat, challenge to “normal” way of life, and long-term uncertainty. In this viewpoint article we outline the particular suitability of mindfulness, its skills and mechanisms, as an approach to the prevention and management of mental health issues, as well as to the promotion of well-being and building the foundations of adaptability and flexibility in dealing with the long-term uncertainty and profound changes to the social, economic, and possibly political systems as this pandemic continues to unfold.

No abstract

No abstract

Alexithymia, characterized by difficulty in identifying and describing feelings and a deficit in the cognitive modulation of emotions, has been linked with health related problems. Indirect empirical evidences suggest the possibility that alexithymia may potentially also relate with emotion regulation difficulties. However, the exact nature of the relationship between the two constructs has not been fully explored. The relationship between the two constructs may reflect the overlap of the content domains or dependence of one (e.g., emotion regulation difficulties) on the other (e.g., alexithymia). Given the link between the two constructs, it is also likely that alexithymics" health related difficulties may result from their impaired ability to regulate emotions. The present study tested the above theoretical propositions on 27 alexithymic and 26 nonalexithymic participants who were assessed on self-report measures of emotion regulation difficulties and general mental health. The findings revealed that compared to non-alexithymics, the alexithymics showed greater emotion regulation difficulties and such affective difficulties differentiated the two groups with a very high accuracy.Further, the observation of two orthogonal components (emotion regulation difficulties and alexithymia) with a minimum overlap suggests that these constructs represent two independent domains of behavior. Findings also revealed that alexithymics reported more health related problems as compared to non-alexithymics and the health problems of alexithymics are likely to be an outcome of their emotion regulation difficulties (indicated by a non-significant health difference after controlling for emotion regulation difficulties). The findings imply that alexithymia is associated with emotion regulation difficulties and such difficulties largely contribute to health related problems.