The Covid-19 Pandemic

Flow, introduced as one of the founding concepts in positive psychology by Csikszentmihalyi (1990), refers to the complete absorption in a challenging mental, emotional, or physical task to the exclusion of attention to any other surrounding thing. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, whole aspects of human life have changed, and language learning is no exception. The present study explored various obstacles in experiencing flow among Iranian EFL learners while completing tasks in three different modalities: face-to-face (F2F), text-based, and audio-based interaction during the Covid-19 pandemic. The data were elicited from 55 upper-intermediate learners divided into three groups completing the tasks in pairs, each through one of the three modalities, as a part of their classroom activity. Immediately following class time, they were interviewed individually or through group chats via WhatsApp. Under the three different modalities, the qualitative content analysis identified obstacles in achieving flow and categorized them into five themes. The results revealed that the main barriers in the face-to-face group were related to contextual or environmental factors as well as to task-induced issues. However, technological, task-based, and teacher-related factors gained higher percentages among text-based and audio-based interaction themes. The findings offer insight into flow perception by second language learners in different task modalities during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This study aimed to assess the effect of spiritual therapy on psychological resilience and the spiritual well-being of caring for patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study was a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test post-test design with control and intervention groups. The statistical population of the study included all caregivers of patients, who were referred to Tehran's hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic, for treatment between June and September 2021. Thirty caregivers who were willing to participate in the research were selected as the sample using purposive sampling and randomly divided into experimental and control groups. Each group of caregivers consisted of 15 individuals. Both experimental and control groups underwent a pretest on Conner & Davidson's (CD-RISC) Resiliency questionnaire and Spiritual well-being scale (SWBS). The experimental group received fourteen sessions of spiritual therapy (90-minute sessions twice a week), but the control group did not receive any spiritual therapy. In addition to descriptive statistics, Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was used to analyze the results and all analyzes were carried out using SPSS-18 software. Findings indicated that spiritual therapy showed a significant difference in the results among the two groups (P<0.001). Results showed significantly increased psychological resilience and the spiritual well-being mean scores of the caregivers in the experimental group compared to the control group after the intervention. Consequently, it is beneficial to implement practices to promote the psychological resilience and spiritual well-being of caregivers. This study provides important implications for clinical practice.