Mindfulness Traits May Affect the Ability of Brief Meditation to Improve Attention
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“even relatively short daily meditation practice can have similar behavioral effects as longer duration and higher-intensity mediation practices.” – Julia Basso
One of the primary effects of mindfulness training is an improvement in the ability to pay attention to the task at hand and ignore interfering stimuli. This is an important consequence of mindfulness training and produces improvements in thinking, reasoning, and creativity. The importance of heightened attentional ability to the individual’s ability to navigate the demands of complex modern life cannot be overstated. It helps in school, at work, in relationships, or simply driving a car. As important as attention is, it’s surprising that little is known about the how much meditation and what types of meditation work best to improve attention
In today’s Research News article “Individual Differences in the Change of Attentional Functions With Brief One-Time Focused Attention and Open Monitoring Meditations.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.716138/full?utm_source=F-AAE&utm_medium=EMLF&utm_campaign=MRK_1765474_a0P58000000G0YfEAK_Psycho_20211102_arts_A ) Tanaka and colleagues recruited university students and randomly assigned them to no-meditation, focused meditation, or open monitoring meditation. The participants were measured for mindfulness, and attentional functions (alerting, orienting, and conflict monitoring). They then spent 30 minutes either listening to music, focused meditation, or open monitoring meditation followed by measurement of attentional functions.
They found that before and after the 30-minute interventions there were no significant differences in attentional functions or mindfulness between the groups. But they found that individual differences in mindfulness affected the effects of the interventions on the alerting attentional function. In particular, employing stepwise multiple regressions, that for participants who practiced focused meditation the higher the nonreactivity mindfulness score the smaller the change in the alerting score. In addition, for participants who practiced open monitoring meditation the higher the describing mindfulness score the larger the change in the alerting score.
It has been previously demonstrated that mindfulness training over a period of time improves attention. The present findings, though, show that a brief, one-time meditation, regardless of type, is not sufficient to improve attention. This suggests that attentional improvement requires repeated meditation practices. The results also suggest that people with different levels of mindfulness may respond differently to meditation affecting attention. There were, however, multiple comparisons (45) involved here and only 2 were significantly different. This could occur be chance. So, caution must be exercised in reaching conclusions about these relationships until they can be replicated.
So, mindfulness traits may affect the ability of brief meditation to improve attention.
“Mindfulness and meditation can have a tangible effect on the way your brain processes and stores information, reducing your stress, increasing your ability to respond flexibly to change, and can improve your ability to focus on tasks and pay attention over a period of time.“ – Maren Hunsberger
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Tanaka M, Nakashima R, Hiromitsu K and Imamizu H (2021) Individual Differences in the Change of Attentional Functions With Brief One-Time Focused Attention and Open Monitoring Meditations. Front. Psychol. 12:716138. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.716138
Mindfulness meditation is increasingly used for clinical treatment and to improve well-being. One of the most fundamental benefits of mindfulness meditation is now considered as enhanced attentional control. Mindfulness meditation is a complex technique but most of its variants consist of a combination of two types of basic meditation practice: focused attention meditation (FAM) and open monitoring meditation (OMM). Although many studies have examined the effect of relatively long-term meditation on attention, some recent studies have focused on the effect of a brief one-time meditation on cognitive processing, including attentional functions. Furthermore, it is necessary to discuss the relationship between the effect of mindfulness meditation on attentional functions and personality traits (especially traits related to mindfulness). This study investigated whether attentional control is improved by a single 30-min FAM or OMM and whether the degree of improvement in attentional functions – alerting, orienting, and conflict monitoring – induced by the meditation varies according to the participant’s trait scores related to mindfulness measured by the Five Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups, i.e., FAM, OMM, and no-meditation (noM) groups, and given an Attentional Network Test before and after each 30-min meditation session. Compared with the noM group, there was no overall improvement in attentional functions with either type of meditation. However, there were associations between the change of the alerting function’s score and the personality traits: in the FAM group, alerting scores were negatively associated with the nonreactivity facet of the FFMQ, and in the OMM group, alerting scores were positively associated with describing facet scores of the FFMQ. The results indicate that the effects of meditation methods on attentional functions could depend on the individual’s traits related to mindfulness and that mindfulness meditation could sometimes appear to have no impact on attentional functions.