Increase Connectedness by Meditating in Pairs
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“Couples meditation provides a great way for you and your partner to tune your instruments to one another. By taking a few minutes to meditate with your partner, you greatly increase your chances of having meaningful conversation and intimate connection. Couples meditation is a way of bringing your emotional state and psychological rhythms into alignment.” – John Wise
Meditation training has been shown to improve health and well-being. It has also been found to be effective for a large array of medical and psychiatric conditions, either stand-alone or in combination with more traditional therapies. As a result, meditation training has been called the third wave of therapies. One problem with understanding meditation effects is that there are, a wide variety of meditation techniques and it is not known which work best for improving different conditions. Also, meditation occurs in a variety of social conditions. It is practiced, alone, with another, dyad, or with groups of varying sizes. It is not known what the effects, if any, of these different social conditions might be on the effectiveness of meditation practice.
Four types of meditation are the most commonly used practices for research purposes. In body scan meditation, the individual focuses on the feelings and sensations of specific parts of the body, systematically moving attention from one area to another. Loving kindness meditation is designed to develop kindness and compassion to oneself and others. The individual systematically pictures different individuals from self, to close friends, to enemies and wishes them happiness, well-being, safety, peace, and ease of well-being. In focused attention meditation, the individual practices paying attention to a single meditation object, learns to filter out distracting stimuli, including thoughts, and learns to stay focused on the present moment, filtering out thoughts centered around the past or future. On the other hand, in open monitoring meditation, the individual opens up awareness to everything that’s being experienced regardless of its origin. These include bodily sensations, external stimuli, and even thoughts. The meditator just observes these stimuli and lets them arise, and fall away without paying them any further attention.
In today’s Research News article “Effects of Contemplative Dyads on Engagement and Perceived Social Connectedness Over 9 Months of Mental Training: A Randomized Clinical Trial.” See:summary below, Kok and Singer investigate the effectiveness of loving kindness meditation and open monitoring meditation practiced in dyads; meditating in pairs. They recruited normal adults aged between 20 to 55 and randomly assigned them to two different orders of conditions in a complex research design. Training in meditation began with a 3-day retreat, followed by 3 months of home-based breath focused attention and body scan meditations practiced in pairs, dyads. The first group of participants then spent 3 months practicing loving kindness meditation in combination with a taking turns for 5-minutes describing feelings and bodily sensations during a difficult situation. The next 3 months they practiced open monitoring meditation in combination with a taking turns for 5-minutes describing a recent situation from the perspective of a randomly assigned “inner part.,” e.g. “the judge” or “the loving mother.” The second group reversed the order to these home-based 3-month dyadic practices. The participants reported daily on their feeling states, contents of thought, meta-cognition, closeness to their partner, valence, and arousal.
They found that the participants liked the loving kindness meditation segment best. Self-disclosures increased and became more personal over the training but this did not differ between conditions. Both conditions also produced significant increases in felt closeness to the partner, but the loving kindness meditation segment produced the greatest increase and the fastest rate of increase in this sense of connectedness.
These results suggest that meditating in pairs is an effective technique producing the usual benefits of meditation and also a social benefit of increasing felt closeness and self-disclosure. This could help in relieving loneliness that is often associated with depression. Loving kindness meditation appeared to be best in promoting these social benefits. Future research needs to investigate the impact of this improved social connectedness on the physical and mental health of the participants. This research is a step in the right direction of better understanding the consequences of different meditation types performed in different social conditions. Such an understanding should improve the targeting of specific meditation techniques to specific physical or psychological needs.
So, increase connectedness by meditating in pairs.
“If you are partnered perhaps either you haven’t felt as connected as you used to or things are going great but you want to make them even better. In either case, meditating together daily, or as often as possible, could make a big difference in the quality of your relationship.” – Your Tango
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
This and other Contemplative Studies posts are also available on Google+ https://plus.google.com/106784388191201299496/posts and on Twitter @MindfulResearch
Study Summary
Kok BE, Singer T. Effects of Contemplative Dyads on Engagement and Perceived Social Connectedness Over 9 Months of Mental Training A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Psychiatry. Published online December 28, 2016. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.3360
Key Points
Question Can 2 newly developed dyadic contemplative exercises increase perceived social connectedness?
Findings In this randomized clinical trial of 242 healthy adults, social closeness increased during a 10-minute dyadic practice session for both the socioaffective affect dyad and the sociocognitive perspective dyad. Furthermore, predyad social closeness and self-disclosure increased significantly for both dyads over the 3 months of a given training module.
Meaning Contemplative dyadic exercises may effectively prevent or reduce the detrimental effects of loneliness and the social deficits often observed in many psychopathologies by increasing perceived social connectedness.
Abstract
IMPORTANCE:
Loneliness is a risk factor for depression and other illnesses and may be caused and reinforced by maladaptive social cognition. Secularized classical meditation training programs address social cognition, but practice typically occurs alone. Little is known about the effectiveness of contemplative practice performed in dyads.
OBJECTIVE:
To introduce and assess the effectiveness of contemplative dyadic practices relative to classical-solitary meditation with regard to engagement and perceived social connectedness.
DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS:
The ReSource Project was a 9-month open-label efficacy trial of three, 3-month secularized mental training modules. Replacement randomization was used to assign 362 healthy participants in Leipzig and Berlin, Germany. Eligible participants were recruited between November 11, 2012, and February 13, 2013, and between November 13, 2013, and April 30, 2014. Intention-to-treat analyses were conducted.
INTERVENTIONS:
Breathing meditation and body scan (the presence module), loving-kindness meditation and affect dyad (the affect module), and observing-thoughts meditation and perspective dyad (the perspective module).
MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES:
Primary outcomes were self-disclosure and social closeness. Engagement measures included compliance (ie, the mean [95% margin of error] number of meditation sessions that a participant engaged in per week), liking, and motivation to practice.
RESULTS:
Thirty participants dropped out after assignment to 3 experimental groups; 90 participants were assigned to a retest control that did not complete the main outcome measures; 16 participants provided no state-change data for the affect and perspective modules (226 remaining participants; mean age of 41.15 years; 59.3% female). Results are aggregated across training cohorts. Compliance was similar across the modules: loving-kindness meditation (3.78 [0.18] sessions), affect dyad (3.59 [0.14] sessions), observing-thoughts meditation (3.63 [0.20] sessions), and perspective dyad (3.24 [0.18] sessions). Motivation was higher for meditation (11.20 [0.40] sessions) than the dyads (9.26 [0.43] sessions) and was higher for the affect dyad (10.11 [0.46] sessions) than the perspective dyad (8.41 [0.46] sessions). Social closeness increased during a session for the affect dyad (1.49 [0.12] sessions) and the perspective dyad (1.06 [0.12] sessions) and increased over time for the affect dyad (slope of 0.016 [0.003]) and the perspective dyad (slope of 0.012 [0.003]). Self-disclosure increased over time for the affect dyad (slope of 0.023 [0.004]) and the perspective dyad (slope of 0.006 [0.005]), increasing more steeply for the affect dyad (P < .001).
CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE:
Contemplative dyads elicited engagement similar to classical contemplative practices and increased perceived social connectedness. Contemplative dyads represent a new type of intervention targeting social connectedness and intersubjective capacities deficient in participants who experience loneliness and in many psychopathologies.