Consequences of mindfulness meditation for emotional flexibility and psychological well-being
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mindfulness has been defined as a quality of "enhanced attention to and awareness of current experience or present reality" (p. 822, Brown Ryan, 2003). Studies of mindfulness-based interventions have shown beneficial effects on well-being---both physical and psychological. However, few studies have addressed the mechanisms underlying these effects---using an experimental approach with conditions that control for nonspecific effects of mindfulness training (e.g., expectancy, relaxation). This thesis examined the possibility that mindfulness meditation may have important consequences for the ability to 'let go' of emotions (i.e., for emotional flexibility), which in turn affects cognitive resources available for decision making, and ultimately psychological well-being. In Study 1, meditation practitioners from the community completed a battery of behavioural measures assessing emotional flexibility. A dot probe task assessed initial orienting of attention to emotional stimuli. In an emotional interference task (EIT) participants viewed pleasant, unpleasant and neutral pictures while responding to the presentation of a tone. A longer history of meditation practice was significantly associated with better disengagement of attention from unpleasant stimuli and with higher scores on questionnaire measures of mindfulness and psychological well-being. There was no relation between initial orienting of attention and duration of meditation experience. In Study 2, using an experimental design, I compared the effects of 7 weeks of mindfulness meditation training to the effects of relaxation training and to performance in a waiting-list control group. Participants in the training conditions were tested before and after the 7-week course using a variety of measures including the EIT, ratings of intensity for pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures, and questionnaire measures of mindfulness and well-being. Only participants who received mindfulness meditation training showed improvements in the ability to disengage their attention from unpleasant stimuli, reduced ratings of feelings of intensity in response to unpleasant stimuli, and signs of reduced physiological arousal. Furthermore, the mindfulness meditation group showed increased scores on self-report measures of mindfulness, psychological well-being, and self-compassion. Together, these findings suggest mindfulness meditation may produce an increase in emotional flexibility, which may in turn account for improvements in well-being.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".