The Science of Mindfulness

Category: Latest Research

  • Intrapsychic Correlates of Professional Quality of Life: Mindfulness, Empathy, and Emotional Separation. (Thomas & Otis, 2010).

    Intrapsychic Correlates of Professional Quality of Life: Mindfulness, Empathy, and Emotional Separation. (Thomas & Otis, 2010).

    Intrapsychic Correlates of Professional Quality of Life: Mindfulness, Empathy, and Emotional Separation

    (Thomas, & Otis, 2010)

    By Brandt Kam


    INTRAPSYCHIC CORRELATES OF PROFESSIONAL QUALITY OF LIFE: MINDFULNESS, EMPATHY, AND EMOTIONAL SEPARATION​
    Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

    There has been a growing body of work regarding correlations between burnout and mindfulness among healthcare workers; however, no studies have examined the relationship between mindfulness in relation to compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, nor burnout among social workers.  Burnout affects practitioners’ well-being, retention, and quality of services provided.  Yet few studies have systematically examined how empathy, emotional regulation, and compassion satisfaction may affect rates of burnout.

    The current investigation builds on this limited amount of empirical evidence regarding empathy and emotional regulation, along with the impact of mindfulness and compassion satisfaction on compassion fatigue and burnout among social workers. 


    INTRAPSYCHIC CORRELATES OF PROFESSIONAL QUALITY OF LIFE: MINDFULNESS, EMPATHY, AND EMOTIONAL SEPARATION​
    Polina Zimmerman/Pexels

    The present study led by Jacky T. Thomas, utilized cross-sectional data to explore the impact that psychological variables such as mindfulness, empathy, and emotional separation had on outcome variables such as compassion fatigue, burnout, and compassion satisfaction.  Participants were randomly selected from the Kentucky Board of Social Workers and mailed 4 surveys to assess professional quality of life, mindfulness, empathy, and emotional separation. The final sample consisted of 171 Licensed Clinical Social Workers who ranged from 31 to 80 years of age.  

    Study results showed that higher emotional separation scores shared significant relationships with lower compassion fatigue and burnout scores, and higher compassion satisfaction scores.  

    The amount of self-reported mindfulness contributed significantly to the variance in burnout scores, and demonstrated the strongest association with compassion satisfaction. 

    “…further studies would benefit from incorporating other measures of empathy since it is believed to be a complex construct that may involve several distinct processes.”

    Findings from the study regarding empathy and emotional separation are consistent with previous findings that it’s not the idea of caring for clients or being moved by a client’s painful circumstances that put practitioners at risk for compassion fatigue or burnout, rather the risk  increases when practitioners care for patients without being able to keep themselves separate.

    Results from this study and previous findings support that mindfulness practices can enhance a therapist’s ability to intentionally and flexibly regulate attention as well as emotional reactivity, which has been demonstrated to influence burnout.  However further studies would benefit from incorporating other measures of empathy since it is believed to be a complex construct that may involve several distinct processes.

    Here, causal relationships between variables are difficult to establish because this study was tested at only one point in time using survey data.

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  • Physician Anxiety and Burnout: Symptom Correlates and a Prospective Pilot Study of App-Delivered Mindfulness Training (Roy et al., 2020)

    Physician Anxiety and Burnout: Symptom Correlates and a Prospective Pilot Study of App-Delivered Mindfulness Training (Roy et al., 2020)

    Physician Anxiety and Burnout: Symptom Correlates and a Prospective Pilot Study of
    App-Delivered Mindfulness Training

    (Roy, Druker, Hoge, & Brewer, 2020)


    By Michael Juberg


    Photo by Adrianna Calvo from Pexels

    Before the COVID-19 pandemic overloaded many of the medical systems across the world, medical professionals were already vulnerable to burnout and anxiety. As the COVID-19 pandemic places greater emotional and physical demand on their work, there is a heightened urgency to develop self-care practices that reduce burnout and ultimately provide higher quality of patient care. 

    Renewed efforts to develop self-care practices for medical professionals have been met with hesitation due to the time constraints and lack of consensus about the root cause of burnout. Previous studies have shown that mindfulness training for medical professions have been effective at targeting burnout and anxiety, however, the time-intensive mindfulness training present a significant barrier for providers with limited time commitment.


    Image by Павел Сорокин from Pixabay

    A new study investigated whether a brief mindfulness training designed to reduce physician burnout could be delivered through a smartphone app. The mindfulness training specifically targets anxiety and the cycle of anxiety that is perpetuated through reinforcement learning. The app delivers daily content for one month consisting of short lessons, randomly prompted assessments, guided meditations (5-15 minutes) and brief (30 second) mindfulness practices. The study recruited 57 physicians who participated during the spring and summer of 2018. Measures of anxiety and burnout, measured by cynicism and emotional exhaustion, were collected at the start of the study, one month, and finally three months later. 

    Study results revealed that physicians reduced their anxiety from their baseline scores by 48% after one month of training and by 57% reduction three months later. The researchers then examined cynicism and emotional exhaustion and found a 50% reduction in cynicism and 20% reduction of emotional exhaustion that were both consistent from the 1-month assessment and 3-month follow up. While the study demonstrated that participants completed an average of 37% of the daily modules with a 70% satisfaction rating immediately after the intervention, participants completed 50% of the daily modules 3 months later with an average satisfaction rating of 80%.

    “…an app-based delivery of mindfulness training is both feasible and appealing to those physicians already suffering from burnout and limited availability to develop self-care practices.”

    The findings from this study contribute to a growing body of evidence supporting brief mindfulness interventions to reduce anxiety and burnout for medical professionals. Importantly, this study found evidence that anxiety was significantly correlated to indices of burnout at every measurement timepoint. 

    As the study authors highlight, an app-based delivery of mindfulness training is both feasible and appealing to those physicians already suffering from burnout and limited availability to develop self-care practices. 

    While this study is novel in demonstrating the efficacy of an app-based mindfulness training for physicians, it should be noted that a small self-selected group of providers and lack of control group limit the scope of these conclusions. Future studies will have the opportunity to examine whether such app-based mindfulness interventions work for a variety of medical professionals and during such periods of heightened emergency medical need. 

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  • Role of Yoga and Mindfulness in Severe Mental Illnesses: A Narrative Review (Sathyanarayan et al., 2019)

    Role of Yoga and Mindfulness in Severe Mental Illnesses: A Narrative Review (Sathyanarayan et al., 2019)

    Role of Yoga and Mindfulness in Severe Mental Illnesses:
    A Narrative Review

    (Sathyanarayan et al., 2019)

    By Emily Badillo

    ROLE OF YOGA AND MINDFULNESS IN SEVERE MENTAL ILLNESSES: A NARRATIVE REVIEW
    Photo by Retha Ferguson from Pexels

    Yoga, translated as “union,” is a philosophical science that offers body, breath, and meditation techniques and practices that have demonstrated significant results in the treatment of various physical and psychiatric disorders.

    Another age-old technique, mindfulness, similarly attracts attention in the scientific sphere. Mindfulness stems from the Buddhist culture and emphasizes nonjudgmental focused attention of the present moment and acceptance of internal experiences.

    Evidence-based scientists have found mindfulness to aid in improvement in coping and self-compassion, reducing stress, anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms in individuals.

    Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

    Most patients with severe mental illnesses (SMIs) such as schizophrenia, major depressive disorder (MDD), and bipolar disorder (BD) have found that current pharmacological agents do not aid in attaining complete remission. Additionally, minimal effects on cognitive deficits coupled with adverse side effects of current medications have led scientists to seek out alternative therapeutic modalities such as yoga and mindfulness to aid in the treatment of SMIs.

    The current study reviewed the wider scientific literature for the role of yoga and mindfulness interventions in the treatment of SMIs. Sathyanarayanan and colleagues (2019) reviewed scientific literature from the past 10 years that focused on either yoga therapy (YT) or mindfulness-based interventions (MBI) that ranged from 40 to 90 min and 60 to 120 min per session in the YT and MBI groups, respectively. 

    “The current study concludes with emphasizing the importance of integrating yoga and mindfulness interventions as add-on therapy for major mental health disorders.”

    Effects of YT and MBI on schizophrenia and other psychotic spectrum disorders

    Both YT and MBI found positive functional outcomes for schizophrenic individuals including better social and occupational functioning, quality of life, achieving functional remission, flexibility of thinking, subjective well-being, improvements in state anxiety, reduction of paranoid beliefs hygiene, life skills, interpersonal activities, and communication. To note, clinicians may want to  consider sleep-deprivation or stress derived psychosis and mania before suggesting yoga or yoga-trainings to certain patients (Lu and Pierre, 2007).

    YT and MBI in bipolar disorder

    The review also examined the effects of YT and MBI on BD. Of those included, YT and MBI were found to improve focusing ability, relaxation, distraction from negative thoughts, a sense of accomplishment, reduction in anxiety and depression, and reduction of negative effects such as agitation with rapid breathing. YT and MBI have also been found to induce a sense of stability in participants that is self-reported to help with managing mood changes and further relapse and facilitate reframing negative thoughts. On the other hand, one study found that heated energetic yoga facilitated patients from hypomanic to manic states and found an increase in depression-like symptoms with meditation, thus further research is required to fully understand how YT and MBI effect BD.

    YT and MBI in major depressive disorder

    Both YT and MBI have demonstrated significant improvement in depression. Interestingly, YT has also been found to improve anxiety, increase behavioral activation, and increase life satisfaction in depressed patients. Maintenance of positive effects produced require continued practice of mindfulness skills and depressive symptoms appear to be directly related to the baseline magnitude of depression.

    Sathyanarayanan and colleagues emphasize that the studies included in this review, similar to the greater body of scientific literature, have several limitations. Some limitations include patients groups initially experiencing low levels of symptom severity before treatment, lack of waitlist control groups, varying frequencies and lengths of time in each session of yoga and mindfulness-based training and practice, and a lack of personalized instruction from a trained yoga therapist. These limitations can be addressed in future research studies.

    The current study concludes with emphasizing the importance of integrating yoga and mindfulness interventions as add-on therapy for major mental health disorders. Further systematic studies are needed to study the beneficial effects and potential neurobiological mechanisms to fully understand the clinical application of yoga therapy and mindfulness-based interventions in the treatment of severe mental illness.

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  • A Randomized Controlled Trial Examining the Effect of Mindfulness Meditation on Working Memory Capacity in Adolescents (Quach et al., 2015)

    A Randomized Controlled Trial Examining the Effect of Mindfulness Meditation on Working Memory Capacity in Adolescents (Quach et al., 2015)

    A Randomized Controlled Trial Examining the Effect of
    Mindfulness Meditation on
    Working Memory Capacity
    in Adolescents

    (Quach et al., 2015)

    By Brandt Kam

    A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL EXAMINING THE EFFECT OF MINDFULNESS MEDITATION ON WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY IN ADOLESCENTS
    Photo by mentatdgt from Pexels

    The amount of research involving mindfulness interventions has grown exponentially, however only in the last decade has mindfulness research involving adolescents increased rapidly.  Mindfulness interventions have been known to exhibit positive health results among adolescents and adults. As these positive health results have become more common, researchers have started to focus on more specific benefits of mindfulness training, namely on working memory.  

    There has been an increase in the study of the impacts that mindfulness may have on working memory because both involve moment to moment awareness. Existing literature with adult samples suggest that mindfulness meditation may be used to increase working memory capacity (WMC), however, the effectiveness of mindfulness training on improving (WMC) in adolescents has not been investigated.  It could be inferred that strengthening WMC among adolescents would be valuable during the developmental stages, where the majority of their day is spent in an educational setting.

    A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL EXAMINING THE EFFECT OF MINDFULNESS MEDITATION ON WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY IN ADOLESCENTS
    Photo by Pragyan Bezbaruah from Pexels

    A study led by Dianna Quach investigated the relationship between mindfulness mediation and working memory capacity among adolescents.  This study was conducted on students from Southern California between the ages of 12 and 17 years old and designed to investigate whether different interventions impacted working memory better than others.  Students were randomly assigned to three different groups, a mindfulness meditation group, a hatha yoga group, and a waitlist control group.

    Study results show that the mindfulness meditation group reported significant improvements pre and post intervention in working memory capacity (WMC), while those participants in the hatha yoga and waitlist control group didn’t report any significant improvement in WMC.  

    The study’s hypothesis that mindfulness meditation was more effective at improving WMC than hatha yoga was supported. The results of this study are provide more evidence that the practice of mindfulness meditation can actively enhance working memory.

    “The results of this study are provide more evidence that the practice of mindfulness meditation can actively enhance working memory.”

    Potential mechanisms may explain the study’s results.  First, meditation requires similar functions to that of (WMC), namely implementing a sustained attention while simultaneously redirecting attention back to the current experience.  Second, it is conceivable that learning to practice hatha yoga mindfully may have proven difficult for adolescents, which could have influenced the results. If done so mindfully, hatha yoga may in fact provide similar benefits to WMC.

    The results of this study are consistent with the notion that the practice of mindfulness meditation is closely related to the function of working memory and promotes it.  Although this study is promising in establishing a positive link between the practice of mindfulness meditation and WMC, further studies need to be conducted in order increase factor generalization.  Also alternative intervention timing may need to be incorporated.

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  • The Differential Moderating Roles of Self-Compassion 
and Mindfulness in Self-Stigma and Well-Being Among People Living with Mental Illness or HIV (Yang et al., 2016)

    The Differential Moderating Roles of Self-Compassion 
and Mindfulness in Self-Stigma and Well-Being Among People Living with Mental Illness or HIV (Yang et al., 2016)

    The Differential Moderating Roles of Self-Compassion 
+ Mindfulness
    in Self-Stigma + Well-Being
    Among People Living with
    Mental Illness or HIV

    (Yang et al., 2016)


    By Michael Juberg


    Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

    People living with mental and chronic illnesses often face forms of discrimination related to their conditions. Self-stigma is a phenomenon when negative stereotypes related to stigmatized identities are self-reinforced by those individuals with illnesses, which can often lead to feelings of shame, low self-esteem, and inadequacy. Self-stigmas cause undue stress on individuals and can also lead to decreased life satisfaction and well-being.

    Current models of self-stigma propose that the phenomenon is comprised of two components, the content (negative thoughts) and the process (frequency and repetition of these thoughts). Mindfulness and self-compassion have been theorized to disrupt the maladaptive repetition of negative thoughts and emotions for patients with chronic or mental illnesses, who are particularly susceptible to psychosocial distress.

    In this study, Yang and her team explored the potential moderating role of self-compassion and mindfulness to self-stigmas and well-being in two clinical samples in Hong Kong, China. The first clinical sample comprised of 169 patients currently living with mental health disorders, ranging from schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, in which 92% of the participants were actively using psychotropic medications as treatment. The second sample consists of 291 patients living with HIV; 87% of the participants were receiving anti-retroviral therapy at the time of the study.


    Photo by Jenna Hamra from Pexels

    All participants were issued a series of questionnaires comprised of five scales that assessed for mindfulness (FFMQ), self-compassion (SCS-SF), the content of self-stigmas (SSS- cognitive subscale), the frequency and repetition of self-stigmas (STARS), and life satisfaction (SLS).

    Interestingly, the results indicated that mindfulness and self-compassion were positively associated with life satisfaction. In other words, patients who viewed themselves as more mindful and self-compassionate also tended to report a higher sense of life satisfaction. Conversely, those who scored higher on self-stigmatizing content and frequency of these negative thoughts were more likely to score lower on life-satisfaction, indicating a negative correlation.

    “Interestingly, the results indicated that mindfulness and self-compassion were positively associated with life satisfaction.”

    Yang and her team confirmed their hypothesis that the moderating effects of mindfulness and self-compassion were group specific. For the clinical sample with mental health issues, mindfulness in particular buffered against the negative association between the frequency of self-stigmas and well-being. 

    However, for the sample of participants with HIV, results indicated that the content of their self-stigma was significantly related to subjective well-being and that self-compassion specifically moderated this relationship.

    These results, although only correlational, provide an intriguing line of investigation that invites a closer examination of the group-specific moderating effects of mindfulness and self-compassion on self-stigma. Furthermore, the study authors suggest an experimental design to establish the causal relationship between mindfulness, self-compassion, and self-stigma. 

    With the ever-expanding application of mindfulness-based interventions for various clinical populations, there seems to be ripe opportunity for the development of interventions or the integration of components that specifically target self-stigma in clinical population to increase well-being and life satisfaction.

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