A four-week loving-kindness meditation program, practiced three times a week for about 30 minutes each session, improved positive emotions, interpersonal interactions, and complex understanding of others among college freshmen. The meditation group showed strong effects, with effect sizes above 0.8 for both interpersonal interaction and complex understanding of others, compared to a control group that received no meditation training. The findings suggest that loving-kindness meditation can effectively enhance social and emotional functioning in college students.
Esketamine improved cognitive impairment caused by the anesthetic propofol in aged rats. Propofol worsened performance on the water maze and sugar-water preference tests, increased neuronal damage and beta-amyloid deposits, and raised markers of inflammation and apoptosis while reducing autophagy-related proteins and synaptic proteins. Esketamine reversed these effects, including restoring levels of BDNF and ATG-5, and decreasing p-Tau and caspase-3. The findings suggest that esketamine acts by inhibiting the mTOR-BDNF pathway, thereby lifting the suppression of neuronal autophagy and protecting against propofol-induced cognitive dysfunction.