Category: Latest Research

Mediating Mindfulness-Based Interventions with Virtual Reality in Non-Clinical Populations: The State-of-the-Art

(Failla et al., 2022)

By Nainika Hira

“How can VR be used for meditation?”

By providing an immersive, engrossing, and controlled visual and auditory experience in which participants can practice mindfulness techniques, Virtual Reality (VR) systems can create immersive, ecologically valid, first-person experiences that can even tap into physiological reactions that align with real-world experiences. This may address the challenge of environmental distractions in mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs). Most of the research that has been conducted on VR-based MBIs has focused solely on clinical subjects. This study aimed to review and evaluate the effectiveness of VR-based MBIs and what impact they have on mood and physiology in a non-clinical population. Only studies that had a control (a comparison group that does not receive the MBI) as well as an experimental group (a group that receives the MBI) were selected for analysis.

The most common mindfulness practices used with VR in this review included non-judgmental breath awareness, a progressive body scan (with scenes at the beach), and videos of forest scenes. The main psychological outcome of this review seemed to be reduced anxiety and an enhanced mindful state. The investigators did point out that this kind of benefit might also be reliant on a general state of calm and reduced fatigue brought on by the particularly enjoyable visual scenes and setups displayed in the VR recordings.

“…most studies used only a brief intervention, implying that MBIs need not necessarily include lengthy or wearisome practices to induce significant mood changes.”

Out of the review, only one study included weekly meditations of about two hours each. Besides, most of the studies only required one meditation session, which ranged from five to fifteen minutes, yet even this was sufficient to reduce negative mood states (anger, depression, anxiety, and tension) and boost mindful states. Hence, most studies used only a brief intervention, implying that MBIs need not necessarily include lengthy or wearisome practices to induce significant mood changes. However, since any type of intervention necessitates more time to promote consistent and long-term change at the behavioral and/or neural level, this may also be a significant limitation of these studies. Secondly, the notable variance in the technological devices and VR procedures used might point towards diverging lines of research but also increase access and ease of delivery. Thirdly, there was a sole reliance on self-report measures, and the studies rarely examined the physiological correlates, such as heart rate variability, of VR-based MBIs.

Future studies have the opportunity to include nonclinical populations from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, ages, genders, cultures and educational qualifications, as well as use a mixed methods approach that includes neurophysiological methods of measurement and/or qualitative reports. Moreover, the review calls for greater rigor in future studies, such as the use of active control groups and three to six-month follow-up assessments. Importantly, since VR-based MBIs are relatively new, the review underscores the imperative to define more robust and reliable methodological procedures for VR-based MBIs for future studies.

Enjoy? Share with your friends

Related Posts

Trait Mindfulness and Relationship Satisfaction: The Role of Forgiveness Among Couples

(Roberts et al., 2020)

By Arushi Srivastava

“How can I have a more satisfying relationship?”

We have pondered this question at some point in our relations, and this is precisely what probed the researchers from Florida State University to explore. The benefits of a satisfying relationship on our mental and physical health are widely noted. The motivation to lead a healthy life encourages individuals to seek factors that promote relationship satisfaction.

One such factor shown to increase relationship satisfaction is trait mindfulness, which is defined as ‘an individual’s predisposition to be mindful and attentive to the present moment in a non-judgmental way.’ Recent research is increasingly highlighting the role of forgiveness in improving relationship satisfaction. But, the link between the three (trait mindfulness, forgiveness and relationship satisfaction) has not yet been studied together. 

The researchers were interested in understanding if forgiveness acts as a mechanism by which mindfulness relates to relationship satisfaction. They speculated that being mindful would allow individuals to be aware of their own and their partners’ emotions in a non-judgmental and non-reactive way. The increased awareness would make people more forgiving of partner transgressions, thereby enhancing relationship satisfaction.

“…mindfulness increases an individual’s tendency to forgive partner wrongdoings, enhancing relationship satisfaction.”

They based this argument on the interpersonal theory, which posits that, because of the interdependent nature of a relationship, ‘romantic partners influence each other’s tendency to respond to a given situation’. To test this, the researchers recruited 226 couples who had been in an opposite-sex relationship for over two years. 

In support of their speculation and extant studies, the researchers found that higher levels of mindfulness are linked with forgiveness, indicating that mindful individuals consider their partners less blameworthy following transgressions. Interestingly, the study also found an association between mindfulness and relationship satisfaction only for female participants. Subsequent research can further explore gender differences between mindfulness and relationship satisfaction. 

The researchers also found an indirect link between trait mindfulness, forgiveness and relationship satisfaction, suggesting that forgiveness acts as a catalyst between mindfulness and relationship satisfaction for male and female partners. This is in line with the possibility that mindfulness increases an individual’s tendency to forgive partner wrongdoings, enhancing relationship satisfaction. Another interesting finding was that males with a higher tendency to forgive had female partners with higher levels of relationship satisfaction and vice versa. Put differently, an individual’s ability to be forgiving and mindful influences their partner’s relationship satisfaction along with their ability and willingness to forgive.

This study emphasizes the importance of forgiveness and mindfulness in enhancing relationship satisfaction. It also aptly implies that practicing mindfulness strengthens an individual and their partner’s relationship satisfaction. Apart from personal implications, these findings hold clinical relevance for working with couples facing relationship difficulties. However, future studies can incorporate diverse ethnic identities and relationship types since this study solely focused on White/Caucasian heterosexual couples. It is also vital to consider the context of transgression when studying forgiveness, as it can impact one’s tendency to forgive.  

Enjoy? Share with your friends

Related Posts

Exploring the Nexus between Mindfulness, Gratitude and Wellbeing Among Youth with the Mediating Role of Hopefulness: A South Asian Perspective

(Ali et al., 2022)

By Arushi Srivastava

Emerging studies are highlighting the effectiveness of mindfulness, gratitude and hopefulness as positive psychological tools in helping people cope with anxiety and stress. These practices have also been considered beneficial in enhancing psychological health and well-being. For the past two years, Covid-19 has considerably disrupted significant areas of people’s lives, leading to depression, anxiety, despair, and fear, thereby decreasing individuals’ overall life satisfaction and well-being. 

The pandemic underscored numerous causes of mental illness, like global inequality in attaining healthcare due to race, gender, and other factors. The International Labour Organization (ILO) in 2020 reported that unemployment and job losses are highly associated with anxiety and depression. Since 63% of the Pakistani population is youth, the situation becomes even more critical for Pakistan. As reported before the pandemic, 50 million people in Pakistan face psychological disorders. A survey conducted during the pandemic highlighted that 42% of participants reported suffering from depression, high levels of anxiety, and socio-emotional problems, whereas 25% experienced suicidal thoughts. 

These alarming statistics were one of the motivations of the research team to delve deeper into understanding whether hope is a critical link between mindfulness, gratitude, and wellbeing. A strong association between mindfulness and gratitude has been established in decreasing psychopathology and enhancing mental well-being. But there is little research that explains the mechanism behind how mindfulness and gratitude work together to enhance mental wellbeing. Therefore, the researchers aimed to study if hopefulness mediates the relationship between mindfulness, gratitude and wellbeing. They based the framework of the study on the broaden-and-build theory, which suggests that positive emotions broaden one’s awareness and encourage positive thoughts and actions, which lead to healthy coping styles. In this context, the authors proposed that gratitude and mindfulness will broaden and build other positive emotions and actions which will enhance wellbeing.

“Whereas current mindfulness conceptualizations have been careful to include gratitude and hope, this study sheds light on the importance of positive emotions and practices like gratitude and mindfulness in eliciting hope, which can synergistically help increase the subjective well-being of individuals.”

The researchers conducted the study on 500 people from Pakistan aged 18-40 years, and the results revealed three interesting findings. Firstly, there was a strong relationship between mindfulness, gratitude and hopefulness. Furthermore, mindfulness was strongly connected with well-being but not with gratitude. Finally, it was found that mindfulness and gratitude increase hopefulness in an individual, and this hopeful state enhances their well-being.

This study is crucial in understanding how mindfulness, gratitude and hopefulness practices can promote well-being in developing healthy coping skills to deal with difficult circumstances. Whereas current mindfulness conceptualizations have been careful to include gratitude and hope, this study sheds light on the importance of positive emotions and practices like gratitude and mindfulness in eliciting hope, which can synergistically help increase the subjective well-being of individuals. However, since this study focused on the youth, future studies can consider older adults as well. This also opens up lines of research interest for people with diverse cultural identities to understand if these findings would still hold across different cultures and societal structures. Additionally, future researchers will have the opportunity to examine the role of positive emotions on physical, intellectual and social resources.  

Enjoy? Share with your friends

Related Posts

An electrophysiological investigation on the emotion regulatory mechanisms of brief open monitoring meditation in novice non-meditators

(Lin et al., 2020)

By Yanli (Jeff) Lin, Ph.D

The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in exploring the psychological benefits of mindfulness meditation. Within this exciting area of research, psychologists and neuroscientists have consistently linked mindfulness practice with better emotion regulation, a vital ability that enables us to manage and appropriately respond to our many emotional experiences. Despite growing knowledge that mindfulness meditation can enhance emotional wellbeing, very little is known about how it all works. How exactly does the act of meditation help us deal with the emotional rollercoaster of everyday life? Is mindfulness training actually “transferrable” to real world situations? What’s going on in the brain? Can we even measure it?

These are the questions that fascinated our team at Michigan State University. In search of answers, we conducted a study that randomized 212 non-meditators to complete either a 20-minute guided mindfulness meditation (the mindfulness group) or listen to a time-matched TED talk on how to quickly learn a new language (the control group). Afterwards, both groups viewed a series of disturbing negative and benign neutral pictures to assess emotional reactivity—i.e., how strongly people react to the negative images compared to the neutral ones. Importantly, all participants completed these tasks while hooked up to electroencephalography, or EEG, so that brain activity could be measured with millisecond precision. At the end of the study, participants provided subjective ratings on their experience of the meditation/TED talk and the picture viewing task.

This design allowed us to ask the following three questions: are there measurable differences in brain activity during meditation relative to the control condition; does mindfulness meditation reduce emotional reactivity; and can brain activity during meditation predict emotional reactivity after meditation? 

“… these findings indicate that the emotional regulatory effects of meditation might depend on the ability to stay awake during practice.”

What we found surprised us! First, the EEG revealed that there were no differences in brain activity between the meditation and control condition. Relative to a baseline resting condition during which participants sat still with their eyes closed, both the meditation and TED talk reduced alpha activity and increased theta activity. Alpha and theta activity are rhythmic electrical brain signals that are thought to reflect alertness (more alertness, less alpha) and cognitive engagement (more cognitive engagement, more theta). With this in mind, finding less alpha and more theta activity is consistent with the idea that we compared an active task (meditation/TED talk) to a passive condition (eyes-closed rest). Most importantly, the findings show that the guided meditation did not produce unique changes to brain activity, suggesting that perhaps more practice is needed before such changes can be reliably observed. 

So what does this mean for the effects of meditation on emotional reactivity? If meditation didn’t alter brain activity, can we expect it to have any emotional regulatory effects? Surprisingly, the answer depends on an unexpected factor: sleepiness. It turns out that participants’ ratings of how sleepy they were during the meditation was positively correlated with emotional reactivity during picture viewing. In other words, higher levels of sleepiness during meditation corresponded to stronger emotional responses to the negative pictures, whereas lower levels of sleepiness corresponded to less emotional reactivity. 

Interestingly, sleepiness didn’t matter for the control group at all—the control group showed strong responses to the negative images regardless of how sleepy they were during the TED talk. Together, these findings indicate that the emotional regulatory effects of meditation might depend on the ability to stay awake during practice! This is something that Buddhist meditation practitioners have known about for a long time. In fact, sleepiness is associated with sloth and torpor, part of the five hindrances that are thought to get in the way of meditative progress.

Last but not least, we found that meditators who showed larger increases in theta brain activity from rest to meditation were less emotionally reactive. Interestingly, this relationship held even after controlling for sleepiness and introduces the promising possibility that theta activity could be a “neural marker” of meditation quality. With that said, we don’t know how or why theta activity might be related to emotional reactivity or even if the relationship is reproducible. It’ll be up to future research to replicate the effect and untangle these exciting (and difficult!) questions. 

If there is anything to take away from this study, it’s the following two ideas. Practically speaking, how and when you meditate matters! Our findings support what many meditators have known for centuries—that sleepiness and fatigue during meditation can hinder progress and that it’s probably a good idea to practice when you’re energized and alert. From a scientific perspective, measuring what’s going on during meditation is an important step in understanding how meditation works.

Enjoy? Share with your friends

Related Posts

Self Compassion,
Quiet Self, and The Brain

(Liu, G., Zhang, N., Teoh, J. Y., Egan, C., Zeffiro, T. A., Davidson, R. J., & Quevedo, K., 2020)

By Guanmin Liu, Ph.D

Excessive focus on our own negative aspects can have harmful effects, such as depression. It is especially so for adolescents, because they are more vulnerable to peers’ negative appraisals. We all remember that when we were teenagers, we were prone to be influenced by such negative views.

As a result, adolescents have higher risk for depression. According to a national survey, 13% of U.S. teens has experienced depression in the past year. In this case, it is important to identify certain psychological factors that buffer the harmful effects of negative self-focus. Self-compassion may be such a factor.

Self-compassion is a cognitive and emotional strategy involving self-kindness, recognition of common humanity and mindfulness in face of negative events. Self-compassionate people tend to have lower level of depression and self-compassion interventions effectively reduces depression.

However, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. Because excessive negative self-focus contributes to depression, our study investigated how self-compassion modulates brain activity when adolescents recognize their own sad face and whether it relates to depression severity.

“These findings suggest that self-compassionate youth dwell less on their own distress but are more empathic to other’s one.”

In the brain-imaging scanner, depressed and healthy youth identified whether digitally-distorted faces of themself or a strangers’ faces with sad, happy, or neutral expressions look like their own. We found that self-compassionate youth show less activity in brain regions previously found activated during self-blame and over-identification with one’s experience. 

Self-compassionate depressed youth also show less activity in a region previously found activated during self-criticism and associated with cognitive control or rumination.

More importantly, less activity in this region further relates to lower depression severity. These findings suggest that self-compassion quiets the self- and rumination-related brain activity, which protects depressed adolescents. 

Intriguingly, when viewing other’s sad face, self-compassionate healthy youth show more – rather than less – activity in brain regions associated with empathy.

These findings suggest that self-compassionate youth dwell less on their own distress but are more empathic to other’s one.

Our study sheds a light on the neural mechanisms by which self-compassion protects depressed adolescents. It also has implications for healthy youth and adults to develop a healthier mind via cultivating compassion towards themselves.

Enjoy? Share with your friends

Related Posts