Brain criticality and advanced meditation "cessation" events: An intensively sampled electroencephalography case study.

A consistent threat throughout human history is the threat from infectious diseases. Pandemics constitute the apex of this threat, having claimed millions of lives. As a case in point, the most recent pandemic, COVID-19, resulted in nearly seven million deaths as it swept across the world from 2020 to 2023 (). Current assessments suggest that the world faces an accelerated risk of pandemics and other health emergencies due to increased urbanization and human–animal interaction (). Accordingly, there is a pressing need to understand both how to contain the risk of disease spread in a more globalized world and how to best prepare and protect societies and citizens when either global pandemics or local epidemics erupt. To diminish the impact of epidemics when they erupt, governments have a large number of policy tools available including implementation of lockdowns and creating wide-ranging networks of test and vaccination centers. Yet, government action is not always enough to diminish the spread of infectious diseases: “How individuals respond to advice on how best to prevent transmission will be as important as government actions, if not more important” (, p. 934). To facilitate individual protective behavior, governments, health organizations, and authorities can engage in informational campaigns to facilitate adherence to advice regarding, for example, physical distancing, masking, and vaccination. Informational campaigns during any crisis have a dual purpose: to provide concrete and actionable advice and to provide appropriate information that motivates the public to follow this advice. In this regard, a key question for policymakers, communicators, and researchers has been which psychological motivations most strongly produce suitable protective behavior during a health emergency and, hence, which motivations to sustain through information campaigns and concrete policies. This question is the focus of the present study. A very large number of studies within health psychology and beyond have sought to provide evidence on the protective role of distinct psychological states during health emergencies (–). Multiple studies with a specific focus on the role of feelings of fear and threat have found evidence that feelings of threat in the face of a health risk predict motivations to engage in protective behavior. In general, these findings were replicated during the COVID-19 pandemic (, ). Yet, while a few studies have modeled the effect of aggregate levels of public fear on objective measures of mobility and infection (), the bulk of studies during the COVID-19 pandemic focused on self-reported measures of protective behaviors. This methodological limitation notwithstanding, another key concern has been the negative byproducts of health communication oriented toward increasing the sense of threat. Researchers have warned against “fear-mongering” () and emphasized that feelings of threat and fear might elicit “pandemic fatigue” (, ), enhance the mental burden of living through a health emergency (), and trigger stigmatization of others including racial minority groups and individuals who are perceived not to follow government advice (, ). The studies underlying these warnings indicate that fatigue, mental health issues, and stigmatization were indeed widespread during the recent COVID-19 pandemic.