The Impact of Intensive Mindfulness Training on Attentional Control, Cognitive Style, and Affect

Abstract

To evaluate the impact of an intensive period of mindfulness meditation training on cognitive and affective function, a non-clinical group of 20 novice meditators were tested before and after participation in a 10-day intensive mindfulness meditation retreat. They were evaluated with self-report scales measuring mindfulness, rumination and affect, as well as performance tasks assessing working memory, sustained attention, and attention switching. Results indicated that those completing the mindfulness training demonstrated significant improvements in self-reported mindfulness, depressive symptoms, rumination, and performance measures of working memory and sustained attention, relative to a comparison group who did not undergo any meditation training. This study suggests future directions for the elucidation of the critical processes that underlie the therapeutic benefits of mindfulness-based interventions.

Rumination mediates the relationship between impaired cognitive control for emotional information and depressive symptoms: A prospective study in remitted depressed adults

“…Possible procedures for strengthening cognitive control are already being used. For example, Mindfulness based cognitive therapy (MBCT) has been demonstrated to be effective in prevention of relapse into depression and research has suggested that this protective effect might be based on changes in cognitive control (Chambers et al, 2008). Also procedures that more directly target underlying cognitive processing, like cognitive training and cognitive bias modification (Baert, Koster & De Raedt, 2011), where cognitive control can be strengthened through computerized training programs can potentially reduce depressive symptoms as well as rumination (Siegle, Ghinassi, & Thase, 2007).…”

“…Recently, a new paradigm was developed for measuring impaired cognitive control, the Internal Shift Task (IST; Chambers, Lo & Allen, 2008). The benefit of this task is that it allows investigating internal attention, in contrast to other tasks which mainly examined cognitive control for externally presented stimuli (cf.…”

“…Both correct and incorrect blocks of items were included in the analyses (cf. Chambers et al, 2008). A recent study showed that reliability of the IST remains very high when both blocks with a correct and incorrect count are included .…”

Worrying and rumination are both associated with reduced cognitive control

“…However, especially the ability to control internal negative information could be an important process underlying persistent negative thought. Therefore, we adopted a paradigm that measures the capacity to switch attention between internal representations in working memory, i.e., the Internal Shift Task (IST; Garavan, 1998;Chambers, Lo, & Allen, 2008). A psychometric evaluation of the IST with emotional facial expressions by De Lissnyder, Koster, and De Raedt (submitted) indicated that the IST is a reliable task for measuring the Internal Switching Cost (ISC), i.e., the difference in RT between switch and no-switch (or repeat) sequences (Monsell, 2003).…”

Effect of mindfulness meditation on brain–computer interface performance

“…Furthermore, long-term meditators show higher performance in the domains of sustained attention (Valentine & Sweet, 1999), executive attention (D. Chan & Woollacott, 2007;van den Hurk, Giommi, Gielen, Speckens, & Barendregt, 2010), and attention switching (Hodgins & Adair, 2010) as compared to matched controls. Studies investigating the effect of a 10-day and a 4-day mindfulness retreats respectively (Chambers, Lo, & Allen, 2008;Zeidan, Johnson, Diamond, David, & Goolkasian, 2010) revealed improvement in working memory capacity in meditators following the retreats. The latter study also observed that the meditators increased mindfulness level over an active control group (Zeidan et al, 2010).…”