Emerging evidence shows that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is negatively affecting mental health around the globe. Interventions to alleviate the psychological impact of the pandemic are urgently needed. Whether mindfulness practice may protect against the harmful emotional effects of a pandemic crisis remains hitherto unknown. We investigated the influence of mindfulness training on mental health during the COVID-19 outbreak in China. We hypothesized that mindfulness practitioners might manifest less pandemic-related distress, depression, anxiety, and stress than non-practitioners and that more frequent practice would be associated with an improvement in mental health during the pandemic. Therefore, we assessed pandemic-related distress and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress, as well as the frequency of meditation practice at the peak of new infections (Feb 4–5; N = 673) and three weeks later (Feb 29–30; N = 521) in mindfulness practitioners via online questionnaires. Self-reported symptoms were also collected from non-practitioners at peak time only (N = 1550). We found lower scores of pandemic-related distress in mindfulness practitioners compared to non-practitioners. In general, older participants showed fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety. In younger practitioners, pandemic-related distress decreased from peak to follow-up. Importantly, increased mindfulness training during the preceding two weeks was associated with lower scores of depression and anxiety at both assessments. Likewise, practice frequency predicted individual improvement in scores of depression, anxiety, and stress at follow-up. Our results indicate that mindfulness meditation might be a viable low-cost intervention to mitigate the psychological impact of the COVID-19 crisis and future pandemics.

Background Patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) have severe deficits in speech and gesture processing that contribute considerably to the burden of this disorder. Brain imaging shows left inferior frontal gyrus involvement for impaired processing of co-verbal gestures in patients with schizophrenia. Recently, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the left frontal lobe has been shown to modulate processing of co-verbal gestures in healthy subjects. Although tDCS has been used to reduce symptoms of patients with SSD, the effects of tDCS on gesture processing deficits remain hitherto unexplored. Objective Here we tested the hypothesis that inhibitory cathodal tDCS of the left frontal lobe decreases pathological dysfunction and improves semantic processing of co-verbal gestures in patients with SSD. Methods We measured ratings and reaction times in a speech–gesture semantic relatedness assessment task during application of frontal, frontoparietal, parietal, and sham tDCS to 20 patients with SSD and 29 healthy controls. Results We found a specific effect of tDCS on speech–gesture relatedness ratings of patients. Frontal compared to parietal and sham stimulation significantly improved the differentiation between related and unrelated gestures. Placement of the second electrode (right frontal vs parietal) did not affect the effect of left frontal stimulation, which reduced the preexisting difference between patients and healthy controls. Conclusion Here we show that left frontal tDCS can improve semantic co-verbal gesture processing in patients with SSD. tDCS could be a viable tool to normalize processing in the left frontal lobe and facilitate direct social communicative functioning in patients with SSD.

Patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder often demonstrate impairments in action-outcome monitoring. Passivity phenomena and hallucinations, in particular, have been related to impairments of efference copy-based predictions which are relevant for the monitoring of outcomes produced by voluntary action. Frontal transcranial direct current stimulation has been shown to improve action-outcome monitoring in healthy subjects. However, whether transcranial direct current stimulation can improve action monitoring in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder remains unknown. We investigated whether transcranial direct current stimulation can improve the detection of temporal action-outcome discrepancies in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder. On 4 separate days, we applied sham or left cathodal/right anodal transcranial direct current stimulation in a randomised order to frontal (F3/F4), parietal (CP3/CP4) and frontoparietal (F3/CP4) areas of 19 patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder and 26 healthy control subjects. Action-outcome monitoring was assessed subsequent to 10 min of sham/transcranial direct current stimulation (1.5 mA). After a self-generated (active) or externally generated (passive) key press, subjects were presented with a visual outcome (a dot on the screen), which was presented after various delays (0–417 ms). Participants had to detect delays between the key press and the visual consequence. Symptom subgroups were explored based on the presence or absence of symptoms related to a paranoid-hallucinatory syndrome. In general, delay-detection performance was impaired in the schizophrenia spectrum disorder compared to the healthy control group. Interaction analyses showed group-specific (schizophrenia spectrum disorder vs healthy control group) and symptom-specific (with/without relevant paranoid-hallucinatory symptoms) transcranial direct current stimulation effects. Post-hoc tests revealed that frontal transcranial direct current stimulation improved the detection of long delays in active conditions and reduced the proportion of false alarms in undelayed trials of the passive condition in patients. The patients with no or few paranoid-hallucinatory symptoms benefited especially from frontal transcranial direct current stimulation in active conditions, while improvement in the patients with paranoid-hallucinatory symptoms was predominantly reflected in reduced false alarm rates in passive conditions. These data provide some first evidence for the potential utility of transcranial direct current stimulation in improving efference copy mechanisms and action-outcome monitoring in schizophrenia spectrum disorder. Current data indicate that improving efference copy-related processes can be especially effective in patients with no or few positive symptoms, while intersensory matching (i.e. task-relevant in passive conditions) could be more susceptible to improvement in patients with paranoid-hallucinatory symptoms.