How does mindfulness modulate self-regulation in pre-adolescent children? An integrative neurocognitive review

Abstract

Pre-adolescence is a key developmental period in which complex intrinsic volitional methods of self-regulation are acquired as a result of rapid maturation within the brain networks underlying the self-regulatory processes of attention control and emotion regulation. Fostering adaptive self-regulation skills during this stage of development has strong implications for physical health, emotional and socio-economic outcomes during adulthood. There is a growing interest in mindfulness-based programmes for pre-adolescents with initial findings suggesting self-regulation improvements, however, neurodevelopmental studies on mindfulness with pre-adolescents are scarce. This analytical review outlines an integrative neuro-developmental approach, which combines self-report and behavioural assessments with event related brain potentials (ERPs) to provide a systemic multilevel understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms of mindfulness in pre-adolescence. We specifically focus on the N2, error related negativity (ERN), error positivity (Pe), P3a, P3b and late positive potential (LPP) ERP components as indexes of mindfulness related modulations in non-volitional bottom-up self-regulatory processes (salience detection, stimulus driven orienting and mind wandering) and volitional top-down self-regulatory processes (endogenous orienting and executive attention).

Assessing the impact of mindfulness attitudes on attentional quality through focused breath induction

“…It has been reported that P3b amplitude is sensitive to task difficulty (Polich, 2009), mindfulness training may increase attention flexibility and adjust attention resource allocation depending on task demands (Kaunhoven & Dorjee, 2017).The task accuracy rate in our study was very high, with all participants showing almost maximum accuracy (mean of 99 correct responses of a total of 100 targets, pre-post in both conditions). It is possible that the easy nature (based on our participant's skills) of our oddball task was insufficient to cause significant changes in the process underlying the P3b or uncover any modulation caused by mindfulness attitudes.…”

Psychophysics with children: Evaluating the use of maximum likelihood estimators in children aged 4–15 years (QUEST+)

“…Firstly, ML estimators require us to make a number of simplifying assumptions (see Discussion). These assumptions may be acceptable in well-trained, relatively homogeneous groups of adults, but may be inappropriate for children, who, for example, often exhibit high levels of inattentiveness (Godwin et al, 2016;Jones, 2018b;Jones, Kalwarowsky, Braddick, Atkinson, & Nardini, 2015;Kaunhoven & Dorjee, 2017;Manning, Jones, Dekker, & Pellicano, 2018;Moore, Ferguson, Halliday, & Riley, 2008;Smallwood, Fishman, & Schooler, 2007;Wightman & Allen, 1992;Witton, Talcott, & Henning, 2017), response bias (Trehub, Schneider, Thorpe, & Judge, 1991;Werner, Marean, Halpin, Spetner, & Gillenwater, 1992), and other nonstationary behaviors. The concern is that such deviations from an ''ideal'' observer might at best degrade the efficiency of the test compared to standard Staircases, and at worse may cause the results to become excessively noisy or biased.…”

Intergenerational Transmission of Religiosity and the Reduction of Thai Adolescent Risk Behaviors

“…Religious practices in the Buddhist frame can potentially lead to a self-regulatory mechanism that guides ones to act and behave prudently and in prosocial manner. Mindfulness meditation as part of the Buddhist practices has gained worldwide attention for its array of applications from cognitive behavioral therapy (Klingbeil et al, 2017) to enhancement of neurocognitive processes fundamental to self-regulation (Kaunhoven & Dorjee, 2017).…”