New research from NYU’s College of Nursing (NYUCN), the University of Miami, and the Lionheart Foundation suggests that mindfulness training can improve attention skills in incarcerated youth, helping them with self-control over emotions and actions.
The NYU website notes that this study is the first of its kind to demonstrate how mindfulness can be used in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy “to protect attentional functioning in high-risk incarcerated youth.”
From the NYU statement:
The researchers followed 267 incarcerated males, ages 16 to 18, over a four-month period. They found that participation in an intervention that combined cognitive behavioral therapy with mindfulness training (or “CBT/MT”), called Power Source, had a protective effect on youths’ attentional capacity. This research is the largest controlled study of mindfulness training for youth to date.
The study, “Mindfulness Training Improves Attentional Task Performance in Incarcerated Youth: A Group Randomized Controlled Intervention Trial,” was published in the online journal Frontiers in Psychology.
To learn more about this study, click here.
