Mindfulness, Prosocial Behavior, and COVID-19 stress

Two recent articles caught my attention. Liu, Wen, Zhang, & Xu (2022) published “Buffering Traumatic Reactions to COVID-19: Mindfulness moderates the relationship between the severity of the pandemic and posttraumatic stress reactions” in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. While they studied only 109 college students home quarantined, they used both a longitudinal and an ecological momentary assessment over seven days and two months later. Here’s part of their abstract: “The results of structural equation modeling showed that state mindfulness moderated the relationship between subjectivity severity of COVID-19 and PTSS. Specifically, the association between subjective severity of COVID-19 and PTSS was positive at the low level of state mindfulness, and negative at the high level of state mindfulness. Trait mindfulness did not moderate the relationship between objectivity severity of COVID-19 and PTSS. Conclusion: Mindfulness-based interventions can be used as preventive mental health education to the daily lives of the general public, and to deal with unpredictable crisis events. Implications of this study are drawn for theory, practice, and research.” 

What is most interesting to me is that trait mindfulness did not moderate the relationship, but state mindfulness did. This suggests that mindfulness intervention can have an impact on posttraumatic stress symptoms.

The second study by Varma, Chen, Lin, Aknin, & Hu (2022) and published in Emotion is “Prosocial Behavior Promotes Positive Emotion during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This study has a larger sample (1623) and experimental designs. Online registration was used to randomly assign people to either an other- or self-beneficial action in April 2019. Here’s part of their abstract:

For the first time, we manipulated whether prosocial behavior was related to the source of stress (coronavirus disease 2019 [COVID-19]): Participants purchased COVID-19-related (personal protective equipment, PPE) or COVID-19-unrelated items (food/writing supplies) for themselves or someone else. Consistent with preregistered hypotheses, prosocial (vs. non-pro-social or proself) behavior led to higher levels of self-reported positive affect, empathy, and social connectedness. Notably, we also found that psychological benefits were larger when generous acts were unrelated to COVID-19 (vs. related to COVID-19). When prosocial and proself spending involved identical COVID-19 PPEs items, prosocial behavior’s benefits were detectable only on empathy and social connectedness, but not on posttask positive affect. These findings suggest that while there are boundary conditions to be considered, generous action offers one strategy to bolster well-being during the pandemic.

Their study is important in that prosocial behavior led to more positive affect, empathy, and social connectedness and being generous to others with items unrelated to COVID-19. The latter finding that posttask positive affect was not higher when COVID-19 PPEs were purchased. 

These studies suggest to me that mindfulness and prosocial behavior are powerful adjuncts to other stress reduction efforts.