People who have a near-death experience during a brush with death report greater spiritual growth afterward than those who come close to death without such an experience. Among 230 self-selected participants, spiritual growth was stronger the deeper the near-death experience. Spiritual decline was similar in both groups and unrelated to the depth of the experience. Near-death experiences are therefore linked to increased posttraumatic spiritual growth but do not affect posttraumatic spiritual decline. The findings suggest that spiritual transformation matters for well-being and that therapies should include ways to foster spiritual growth.
Depression is linked to high levels of mind-wandering and low self-compassion. In a depressed sample, mind-wandering was associated with higher depressive symptoms only among those with low self-compassion. Self-compassion predicted improvement in depression. An eight-week Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) program increased self-compassion and reduced mind-wandering compared to a treatment-as-usual control group. Longitudinally, increases in mind-wandering were linked to increases in depressive symptoms only among those whose self-compassion decreased. Self-compassion can protect against the harmful effects of mind-wandering in depression, and MBCT effectively targets both protective and risk factors for depression.
Subjective and objective anomalies associated with ghostly episodes form a unidimensional Rasch scale, and these interconnected signs or symptoms arguably describe a syndrome model. This model predicts that the phenomenology of these anomalous episodes can be markedly skewed by an experient's psychological set, which is impacted by psychosocial variables affecting attentional, perceptual, and interpretational processes. The overview discusses how Belief in the Paranormal, Religious Ideology, Ideological Practice, Social Desirability, Latency, and Environmental Setting ostensibly influence the contents or interpretations of accounts. Future research should help validate the proposed syndrome model and explore which nuances reflect idiosyncrasies of experients' psychological set versus the core phenomenon.