Editor’s note: In the interest of sharing how mindfulness science is growing, we wanted to make recently-published research articles on mindfulness more accessible to our readers. Watch this space for the latest mindfulness research, curated for the Research Roundup department of Mindful magazine by The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
Research Roundup
April 2015 issue of Mindful magazine
Disrupting Our Brain’s Bias
Racial bias in policing is at the forefront of the news. So it’s heartening to see a study that finds bias can be reduced through mindfulness training. Adam Lueke and Brian Gibson of Central Michigan University looked at how instructing white college students in mindfulness would affect their “implicit bias”—or unconscious negative reactions—to black faces and faces of older people. After listening to a 10-minute mindfulness audiotape, students were significantly less likely to automatically pair negative descriptive words with black and elderly faces than were those in a control group—a finding that could be important for policing, which often involves split-second assessments of people. Why the connection between mindfulness and bias? Mindfulness has the power to interrupt the link between past experience and impulsive responding, the authors speculate.
Mindfulness=Helpfulness
Have you ever had a bad feeling when helping someone, like guilt or resentment? In the January issue of the journal Mindfulness, C. Daryl Cameron and Barbara Fredrickson explored if mindful qualities could help people feel good about aiding others. They asked 313 adults if they had recently helped someone out—and if they had, then researchers asked them how they felt while helping. They also assessed the mindful traits of participants, asking if, for example, they often criticize themselves “for having irrational or inappropriate emotions.” In analyzing the answers, the researchers found that mindfulness did indeed lead to increased helping behavior. They also found that two facets of mindfulness—present-focused attention and nonjudgmental acceptance—specifically encouraged people to experience emotions like compassion, joy, or elevation during the act of helping.
Emodiversity: The Key to Happiness?
Is the route to happiness simply to feel more positive emotions and fewer negative ones? Some research already cast doubt on that view, and a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General lends an even stronger rebuttal.
Researchers from four countries and six institutions—including Yale University and Harvard Business School—measured participants’ positive emotions (like amusement, awe, and gratitude) and negative ones (like anger, anxiety, and sadness), considering both the level of these emotions and also their variety and abundance—what the researchers call “emodiversity.”
Their first study surveyed over 35,000 French speakers and found that emodiversity is related to less depression. This was the case for all types of emodiversity: positive (experiencing many different positive emotions), negative (many different negative emotions), and general (a mix of both). In fact, people high in general emodiversity were less likely to be depressed than people high in positive emotion alone.
With almost 1,300 Belgian participants, the second study linked emodiversity to less medication use, lower government health-care costs, and fewer doctor visits and days spent in the hospital. It was also related to better diet, exercise, and smoking habits. Surprisingly, the effect of emodiversity on physical health was about as strong as the effects of positive or negative emotion alone.
The message? Emotional monotony is a drag, so we may be better off mentally and physically if we seek out and embrace a variety of emotional experiences—even the negative ones.
Aiding Troubled Teens
It’s not easy teaching mindfulness to teenagers. Yet teens, especially troubled ones, might stand to gain more than most by cultivating moment-to-moment awareness. A team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine studied the responses of 27 at-risk, ethnically diverse students who had been randomly assigned to either a mindfulness or substance-abuse control class. As they taught the kids mindfulness, the team continually modified the teaching based on their feedback. At the end, they found teens in the mindfulness class were significantly less prone to depression and stress compared to those who attended the substance-abuse class. They also found the credibility of the mindfulness course among initially skeptical teens went up as the class went on through the semester.
Mindful Mom, Healthy Child
A new study finds there may be a link between the mind of a mother and the health of her infant. A Dutch and Belgian team of researchers gave 90 mothers with 10-month-old babies surveys designed to measure their levels of mindfulness and anxiety, asking such questions as whether they are “open to the experience of the moment” or if they “observe mistakes and difficulties without self-judgment.” The team then asked about the babies, to gauge their health and development, and found very strong evidence that mindful traits in moms are associated with better outcomes for the babies. This is a new area of study, but the preliminary results suggest that mindfulness training for pregnant women sure couldn’t hurt!
Research Roundup
February 2015 issue of Mindful magazine
Healthy Mind, Healthy Heart
Many studies have found that mindfulness can support our health, but the credibility of those studies has often suffered from small sample sizes. A new, authoritative study from Brown University looked specifically at the relationship between cardiovascular health and “dispositional mindfulness”—that is, an uncultivated and natural moment-to-moment awareness. The researchers measured the mindful traits of 400 people, asking participants if, for example, they tend to “break or spill things because of carelessness, not paying attention, or thinking of something else.” When the researchers analyzed those answers in relation to their health, they found strong evidence that being a mindful person went hand in hand with a healthier heart and lungs, often because these qualities were associated with not smoking and with getting regular exercise. In other words, moment-to-moment changes in thinking didn’t seem to improve health on its own—instead, mindful traits seem to boost positive behaviors and undermine negative ones.
Pain, Pain, Go Away
Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the pioneering mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program, has long cited evidence that mindfulness meditation helps with pain management. In a study published in the November 2014 edition of the journal Pain Medicine, Peter la Cour and Marian Petersen randomly sorted 109 patients with chronic pain into either an MBSR training program or a wait list control group. They measured pain, p