An energizing microintervention: How mindfulness fosters subjective vitality through regulatory processes and flow experience at work.

Can adopting one's morning routines influence employees' experiences throughout the day? To answer this focal question, we examine the daily effects of a brief meditation in the morning on well-being throughout the day considering spillover effects from the home to the work domain and back. To identify the dominant underlying mechanisms of this daily spillover, we draw on the personality systems interactions theory that distinguishes between autonomous self-regulation and effortful self-control as two psychological processes that reflect the regulation of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in alignment or contradiction with one's interests, values, and goals. Accordingly, we hypothesized that meditating in the morning before work fosters autonomous self-regulation and reduces effortful self-control in the work domain, which subsequently facilitates the experience of flow at work and hence fosters subjective vitality in the home domain after work. A quasi-experimental daily-diary study over 10 days with a brief 10-min mindfulness intervention during the final 5 days with 78 participants (588 day-level data points) supported most of our predictions. More specifically, our data suggest a positive indirect effect of the intervention on subjective vitality in the evening via self-regulation and flow experience. However, there was no indirect effect of the intervention on subjective vitality via self-control. The results help to clarify how a mindfulness-based intervention can influence distinct regulatory processes and well-being, crossing boundaries between the work and home domains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Explicating the role of amygdala substructure alterations in the link between hypoleptinemia and rumination in anorexia nervosa.

OBJECTIVE: The amygdaloid complex plays a pivotal role in emotion processing and has been associated with rumination transdiagnostically. In anorexia nervosa (AN), we previously observed differential reductions of amygdala nuclei volumes (rostral-medial cluster substantially affected) and, in another study, elevated food-/weight-related rumination. Both amygdala volumes and rumination frequency correlated with characteristically suppressed leptin levels in AN. Thus, we hypothesized that amygdala nuclei alterations might be associated with AN-related rumination and potentially mediate the leptin-rumination relationship in AN. METHODS: Rumination (food-/weight-related) was assessed using ecological momentary assessment for a 14-day period. We employed frequentist and Bayesian linear mixed effects models in females with AN (n = 51, 12-29 years, majority admitted to inpatient treatment) and age-matched healthy females (n = 51) to investigate associations between rostral-medial amygdala nuclei volume alterations (accessory basal, cortical, medial nuclei, corticoamygdaloid transitions) and rumination. We analyzed mediation effects using multi-level structural equation models. RESULTS: Reduced right accessory basal and cortical nuclei volumes predicted more frequent weight-related rumination in AN; both nuclei fully mediated the effect of leptin on weight-related rumination. In contrast, we found robust evidence for the absence of amygdala nuclei volume effects on rumination in healthy females. CONCLUSION: This study provides first evidence for the relevance of specific amygdala substructure reductions regarding cognitive symptom severity in AN and points toward novel mechanistic insight into the relationship between hypoleptinemia and rumination, which might involve the amygdaloid complex. Our findings in AN may have important clinical value with respect to understanding the beneficial neuropsychiatric effects of leptin (treatment) in AN and potentially other psychiatric conditions such as depression.