Time

Improve College Students’ Well-Being with Balanced Time Perspective and Mindfulness

psyjdc Leave a comment

Improve College Students’ Well-Being with Balanced Time Perspective and Mindfulness

 

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

 

“a higher level of mindfulness promotes a more balanced time perspective, with a reduced focus on negative aspects of the past and negative anticipations of the future.” – Michael Rönnlund

 

Mindfulness stresses present moment awareness, minimizing focus on past memories and

future planning. But, to effectively navigate the environment it is necessary to remember past experiences and project future consequences of behavior. So, there is a need to be balanced such that the amount of attention focused on the past, present, and future is balanced. This has been termed as balance time perspective. Mindfulness helps improve balanced time perspective and improve well-being. The relationship of mindfulness and balanced time perspective with psychological well-being needs further investigation.

 

In today’s Research News article “Mindfulness and Balanced Time Perspective: Predictive Model of Psychological Well-Being and Gender Differences in College Students.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8946884/ ) Fuentes and colleagues recruited university students and had them complete measures of mindfulness, psychological well-being, and time perspective, including measures of past positive, past negative, present hedonistic, present fatalistic, and future.

 

They found that the higher the levels of mindfulness, the higher the levels of psychological well-being future, balanced time perspective and past positive time perspectives, and the lower the levels of balanced time perspective, past negative, and present fatalistic. In addition, the higher the levels of psychological well-being the higher the levels of balanced time perspective, future, and past positive time perspectives, and the lower the levels of past negative and present fatalistic. They also found that women had higher levels of past positive time perspective while men had higher levels of present hedonistic time perspective.

 

“It appears that, together, mindfulness and [balanced time perspective] promote optimal psychological functioning beyond alleviating or reducing discomfort.” – Authors conclusion. In other word when mindfulness is high and the amount of attention focused on the past, present, and future is balanced there are greater levels of psychological well-being. It remains to be seen if training in balanced time perspective will result in greater psychological health.

 

“Both mindfulness and Balanced Time Perspective (BTP) are well confirmed and robust predictors of various aspects of well-being.” – Maciej Stolarsk

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

This and other Contemplative Studies posts are also available on Twitter @MindfulResearch

 

Study Summary

 

Fuentes, A., Oyanadel, C., Zimbardo, P., González-Loyola, M., Olivera-Figueroa, L. A., & Peñate, W. (2022). Mindfulness and Balanced Time Perspective: Predictive Model of Psychological Well-Being and Gender Differences in College Students. European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education, 12(3), 306–318. https://doi.org/10.3390/ejihpe12030022

 

Abstract

Background: The aims of the study were to establish an adjustment model to analyze the relationship among mindfulness, balanced time perspective (BTP) and psychological well-being (PWB) in college students and to explore gender differences among the variables. Method: The sample consisted of 380 college students, 220 women and 160 men, uniformly distributed according to the university’s faculties. Results: The results indicate that the synergy between mindfulness and BTP predicts the variance of PWB by 55%. Regarding gender differences, it was found that women have a greater tendency towards Past Positive than men and men a higher tendency towards Present Hedonistic than women. In addition, in the group of women, a stronger relationship was found among the variables and, consequently, a greater predictive value for PWB (58%), displaying an enhanced disposition to high PWB compared to men. Conclusions: Together, mindfulness and BTP promote optimal psychological functioning and alleviate or reduce discomfort. Thus, their promotion and training in universities is especially important given the high prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms in college students.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8946884/

 

Change the Experience of Music with Mindfulness

psyjdc Leave a comment

Change the Experience of Music with Mindfulness

 

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

 

“Music and meditation both allow a fuller and richer experience of our emotions: They stop our incessant and often negative mental chatter and offer us an opportunity to inhabit the present moment more fully and meaningfully.” –  Darin McFadyen

 

Mindfulness practice has been shown to improve emotion regulation. Practitioners demonstrate the ability to fully sense and experience emotions but respond to them in more appropriate and adaptive ways. In other words, mindful people are better able to experience yet control their responses to emotions. This is a very important consequence of mindfulness. Humans are very emotional creatures and these emotions can be very pleasant, providing the spice of life. But when they get extreme, they can produce misery and even mental illness.

 

Music also evokes emotions. These appear to be somewhat different from those evoked in everyday life and so they are given a different term “aesthetic emotions”. These are one of the reasons that music is so universally popular. Mindfulness has been shown to improve the appreciation of music. It is not known, however, is mindfulness changes the emotional appreciation of music; aesthetic emotions.

 

In today’s Research News article “Effects of Mindfulness Meditation on Musical Aesthetic Emotion Processing.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648062/full?utm_source=F-AAE&utm_medium=EMLF&utm_campaign=MRK_1689544_a0P58000000G0YfEAK_Psycho_20210727_arts_A ) Liu and colleagues recruited college students who did not have any musical training or mindfulness meditation training. They were measured for mindfulness and positive and negative emotions and randomly assigned to either no further training or to receive a 10-minute mindfulness meditation training. After the training they listened to “15 music clips (duration 1 min) from the Chinese classical folk instrumental musical works” in a randomized order. Five of which were happy, 5 sad, and 5 calm. After each clip the students completed Likert scales of the recognition, experience, tension, beauty, and liking of the clips and the emotions experienced by the students when listening to the clips.

 

They found that in comparison to the control group, the group that received brief mindfulness meditation training were significantly less accurate in identifying the emotion portrayed in the clips, experienced significantly less emotion in themselves while listening to the clips, experienced reduced body awareness, and experienced a faster passage of time while listening to the music. The mindfulness training group also found the clips significantly more beautiful than the control group.

 

The brief mindfulness meditation reduced the recognition of the emotion of the music and the magnitude of the emotional responses to it. This is likely due to the ability of mindfulness to improve emotion regulation, allowing them to experience the emotion but not overly respond to it. Mindfulness also increased the experience of the beauty of the music, perhaps as a result to mindfulness increasing their attention to the music itself. The faster musical time perception experienced and lower body awareness by the mindfulness group may also be due to the increased attention to the music.

 

These are interesting results that suggest that mindfulness influences the effect of music on the listener, reducing emotional intensity, body awareness and time perception while listening, but increasing the perceived beauty of the music. Mindfulness appears to alter the aesthetic emotional appreciation of the music.

 

So, change the experience of music with mindfulness.

 

“Combining music with meditation can deepen the positive effects of both, and bring you greater stress relief.” – Elizabeth Scott

 

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

 

Liu X, Liu Y, Shi H and Zheng M (2021) Effects of Mindfulness Meditation on Musical Aesthetic Emotion Processing. Front. Psychol. 12:648062. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648062

 

Mindfulness meditation is a form of self-regulatory training for the mind and the body. The relationship between mindfulness meditation and musical aesthetic emotion processing (MAEP) remains unclear. This study aimed to explore the effect of temporary mindfulness meditation on MAEP while listening to Chinese classical folk instrumental musical works. A 2 [(groups: mindfulness meditation group (MMG); control group (CG)] × 3 (music emotions: calm music, happy music, and sad music) mixed experimental design and a convenience sample of university students were used to verify our hypotheses, which were based on the premise that temporary mindfulness meditation may affect MAEP (MMG vs. CG). Sixty-seven non-musically trained participants (65.7% female, age range: 18–22 years) were randomly assigned to two groups (MMG or CG). Participants in MMG were given a single 10-min recorded mindfulness meditation training before and when listening to music. The instruments for psychological measurement comprised of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). Self-report results showed no significant between-group differences for PANAS and for the scores of four subscales of the FFMQ (p > 0.05 throughout), except for the non-judging of inner experience subscale. Results showed that temporary mindfulness meditation training decreased the negative emotional experiences of happy and sad music and the positive emotional experiences of calm music during recognition and experience and promoted beautiful musical experiences in individuals with no musical training. Maintaining a state of mindfulness while listening to music enhanced body awareness and led to experiencing a faster passage of musical time. In addition, it was found that Chinese classical folk instrumental musical works effectively induced aesthetic emotion and produced multidimensional aesthetic experiences among non-musically trained adults. This study provides new insights into the relationship between mindfulness and music emotion.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648062/full?utm_source=F-AAE&utm_medium=EMLF&utm_campaign=MRK_1689544_a0P58000000G0YfEAK_Psycho_20210727_arts_A

 

Mindfulness Alters Rapid Temporal Order Perception

psyjdc Leave a comment

Mindfulness Alters Rapid Temporal Order Perception

 

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

 

“Mindfulness represents a balanced and holistic subjective experience of time.” – Ian LeSueur

 

We have a bias to notice things occurring on the left first. This is probably due to our training with words and numbers to pay attention first to the leftmost character. But this produces a perceptual bias when looking at two events occurring very close in time producing a tendency to see the leftmost stimulus as occurring first even when they occur at the first time. Mindfulness has been shown to alter time perception. It has also been shown to enhance attention which could also alter time perception. It is not known, however, if mindfulness training might alter the left to right bias in perception.

 

In today’s Research News article “Mindfulness Meditation Biases Visual Temporal Order Discrimination but Not Under Conditions of Temporal Ventriloquism.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01937/full?utm_source=F-AAE&utm_medium=EMLF&utm_campaign=MRK_1401267_69_Psycho_20200811_arts_A) Tian and colleagues recruited healthy adults and randomly assigned them to receive either mindfulness training or to a wait-list control condition. Mindfulness training consisted of 8 weekly 2.5-hour sessions including discussion, walking and sitting meditation, body scan, and yoga along with daily 30-minute practice.

 

Before and after training they participated in a temporal order perception task in which two disks were visually presented at the same time of separated in time by either 50, 100, or 150 milliseconds. Half the time the left disk was first and half the right disk was first. These were presented under 3 conditions, visually only, accompanied with beeps, or with a beep 50 milliseconds before the first disk and 50 milliseconds after the second disk.

 

There is a normal left to right tendency such that people have a bias to see the disk on the left side as being first. This bias was amplified by mindfulness training. They found that after mindfulness training there was a significantly greater tendency to see the left disk as first. In addition, the greater the mindfulness facet of acting with awareness the greater the increase in the bias. Interesting, the difference disappeared when the beeps were present either synchronously with the disks or preceded and followed the disks by 50 milliseconds.

 

These findings are interesting in that they show the effects of mindfulness training on temporal judgement of very rapidly occurring events. This was probably due to the enhanced attention that occurs with mindfulness training. The fact that a distractor, the beeps, eliminated the effects suggests that mindfulness only has this effect under simple conditions where attention focus can be maximized.

 

So, mindfulness alters rapid temporal order perception.

 

“The subjective experience of an acceleration of time arises partially from the fact that the cognitive resources are fully occupied by the realization of the mindfulness activity.” – Sylvie Droit-Volet

 

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

 

Tian Y, Liu X and Chen L (2020) Mindfulness Meditation Biases Visual Temporal Order Discrimination but Not Under Conditions of Temporal Ventriloquism. Front. Psychol. 11:1937. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01937

 

This study examined how cognitive plasticity acquired from a long (8 weeks) course of mindfulness training can modulate the perceptual processing of temporal order judgment (TOJ) on a sub-second scale. Observers carried out a TOJ on two visual disks, with or without concurrent paired beeps. A temporal ventriloquism paradigm was used in which the sound beeps either were synchronized with the two disks or bracketed the visual stimuli by leading the first disk by 50 ms and lagging the other by 50 ms. A left-to-right bias in TOJ was found under the visual-only condition after mindfulness training. This bias was positively correlated with “acting with awareness,” a factor in the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, showing that awareness of every moment and enhanced attention focus magnify the left-to-right bias. However, the effect of mindfulness training may be short-lived and was not present when attention was diverted by auditory events in the cross-modal temporal ventriloquism illusion.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01937/full?utm_source=F-AAE&utm_medium=EMLF&utm_campaign=MRK_1401267_69_Psycho_20200811_arts_A

Meditation Alters the Perception of the Passage of Time

psyjdc Leave a comment

Meditation Alters the Perception of the Passage of Time

 

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

 

“Experienced meditators typically report that they experience time slowing down in meditation practice as well as in everyday life. Conceptually this phenomenon may be understood through functional states of mindfulness.” – Marc Wittmann

 

There are times in life when time just seems to wiz by and others when it seems to creep. There are also times when it seems like a minute passing feels like 5 minutes and others when it feels like only a few seconds. In other words, our sense of the speed of time passing and the amount of time that has passed varies from occasion to occasion. One factor that effects the perception of time is the content of the interval and the frequency of events occurring. If the interval is relatively packed with events and stimuli, then the time period is overestimated, suggesting that time seemed to pass more slowly. If, on the other hand, there are few things occurring in the interval, then time is underestimated, suggesting that time seemed to pass more quickly.

 

Meditation involves paying close attention to the contents of the present moment; calming the mind and reducing thinking and discursive thought. Focusing on the present moment would tend to fill awareness. This suggests that meditating would increase the apparent amount of things occurring and would thus predict that the interval would appear longer than otherwise.

 

In today’s Research News article “Mindfulness meditation, time judgment and time experience: Importance of the time scale considered (seconds or minutes).” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6799951/), Droit-Volet and colleagues recruited college students and randomly assigned them to receive either mindfulness meditation (body scan) or a control condition (listening to poems). In the first study, the mindfulness meditation participants listened to a guided body scan meditation while lying on their backs at home for 11 minutes daily for 7 days. The control condition was similar except they listened to recorded poems. They were then tested in the lab where they first meditated or listened to poems for 8 minutes and then were presented by tones separated either by short intervals (16-50 seconds) or long intervals (2-6 minutes) and were asked to estimated the duration of the intervals.

 

They found that the meditation group in comparison to the controls significantly underestimated the duration of the short intervals and significantly overestimated the duration of the longer intervals. During the session the meditation group but not the control group reported a significant reduction in anxiety and a significant increase in happiness and significantly faster passage of time.

 

In a second study a similar procedure was followed except that the same participants performed the meditation and also the control condition in counterbalanced order and only long intervals were used. In addition, they reported for each interval the passage of time, demands on their attention, task difficulty, present moment focus, and arousal levels.

 

Once again, they found that during the meditation session the participants overestimated the durations of the long intervals. They also indicated significantly longer passage of time, significantly greater demands on their attention, task difficulty, and present moment focus. They found that present moment awareness mediated the effect of meditation on duration estimates with the greater the focus on the present moment the greater the overestimation of the interval duration.

 

They suggest that the underestimation of the short intervals by the meditation group was due to the effects of attentional focus on the apparent passage of time with high degrees of attentional focus occupying the mind such that there is little resource left for assessing the passage of time. The results also suggest that the overestimation of long intervals was due to attention on the present moment. By focusing on the contents of awareness in the present moment there is a greater amount of stimuli in awareness, filling awareness. More happening signals a greater amount of time passing. Regardless of the explanation, the study demonstrates that meditation alters the estimation of time passage.

 

So, meditation alters the perception of the passage of time.

 

“My favorite pastime is to let time pass, to have time, to take my time, to live against time.” — Françoise Sagan

 

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

 

Droit-Volet, S., Chaulet, M., Dutheil, F., & Dambrun, M. (2019). Mindfulness meditation, time judgment and time experience: Importance of the time scale considered (seconds or minutes). PloS one, 14(10), e0223567. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0223567

 

Abstract

This manuscript presents two studies on the effect of mindfulness meditation on duration judgment and its relationship to the subjective experience of time when the interval durations are on the second or the minute time scale. After the first 15 minutes of a 30-min meditation or control exercise, meditation-trained participants judged interval durations of 15 to 50 s or 2 to 6 min, during which they performed either a mindfulness meditation exercise or a control exercise. The participants’ scores on the self-reported scales indicated the effectiveness of the meditation exercise, as it increased the level of present-moment awareness and happiness and decreased that of anxiety. The results showed an underestimation of time for the short interval durations and an overestimation of time for the long intervals, although the participants always reported that time passed faster with meditation than with the control exercise. Further statistical analyses revealed that the focus on the present-moment significantly mediated the exercise effect on the time estimates for long durations. The inversion in time estimates between the two time scales is explained in terms of the different mechanisms underlying the judgment of short and long durations, i.e., the cognitive mechanisms of attention and memory, respectively.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6799951/

 

Improve Balanced Time Perspective with Mindfulness

psyjdc Leave a comment

Improve Balanced Time Perspective with Mindfulness

 

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

 

“It is how we think about the future that determines whether the outcome is beneficial. You can think about what you want and how to make it happen, or you can think about what you don’t want and worry about how to prevent it from happening. The first way increases your chances of bringing positive emotions and experiences into your life, while the second causes you to experience negative emotions about things that may never happen; further, it decreases the amount of time and energy you have for creating positive experiences.” – Jannice Vilhauer

 

Mindfulness stresses present moment awareness, minimizing focus on past memories and

future planning. But, to effectively navigate the environment it is necessary to remember past experiences and project future consequences of behavior. So, there is a need to be balanced such that the amount of attention focused on the past, present, and future is balanced. This has been termed as balanced time perspective. It is possible that mindfulness helps balance time perspective or that it might even overly emphasize the present moment to the detriment of balance. The relationship of mindfulness to this balanced time perspective has not been previously investigated.

 

In today’s Research News article “Self-Compassion and Subjective Well-Being Mediate the Impact of Mindfulness on Balanced Time Perspective in Chinese College Students.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6395405/), Ge and colleagues recruited college students and measured them for mindfulness, self-compassion, subjective well-being, balanced time perspective, and time perspective including subscales measuring past negative, past positive, present fatalistic, present hedonistic, and future.

 

They found that mindfulness was positively related to balanced time perspective directly with the higher the levels of mindfulness the better the balance in time perspective. They also observed that mindfulness was positively related to balanced time perspective indirectly through self-compassion and subjective well-being such that high levels of mindfulness was associated with higher levels of self-compassion and subjective well-being which, in turn, were associated with higher balanced time perspective.

 

These results are interesting and for the first time demonstrate a positive relationship of mindfulness to balanced time perspective. Since a balanced time perspective may be seen as an adaptive mix of past, present, and future perspectives, it is possible that this is one of the reasons that mindfulness has such positive effects on mental health and well-being. So, mindfulness may be beneficial not just by increasing present moment awareness but also by producing appropriate allocation of attention to the past or the future where appropriate. It remains for future research to examine these possibilities.

 

So, improve balanced time perspective with mindfulness.

 

“while a mindfulness exercise that shifts attention to internal events extends one’s experience of time, a mindfulness exercise that shifts attention to an external event could potentially make time feel like it’s passing more quickly.” – Emily Nauman

 

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

 

Ge, J., Wu, J., Li, K., & Zheng, Y. (2019). Self-Compassion and Subjective Well-Being Mediate the Impact of Mindfulness on Balanced Time Perspective in Chinese College Students. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 367. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00367

 

Abstract

Balanced time perspective is associated with optimal social functioning and provides psychological benefits in times of stress. Previous studies have found that mindfulness is positively associated with balanced time perspective and might promote it. However, the mechanism through which mindfulness affects balanced time perspective remains unexplored. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the mediating role of self-compassion and subjective well-being in the relationship between mindfulness and balanced time perspective. A total of 754 Chinese college students, aged 17–27 years, completed the Chinese versions of the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, Self-Compassion Scale, Subjective Well-Being Scale, and Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory. There were significant positive correlations between mindfulness, self-compassion, subjective well-being, and balanced time perspective. Structural equation modeling indicated that in addition to the direct influence of mindfulness on balanced time perspective, self-compassion and subjective well-being played a partial mediating role. On the basis of these findings, we conclude that mindfulness has an important positive influence on balanced time perspective, and highlights the crucial role of the self-compassion in cultivating a balanced time perspective. Limitations of the present study are also discussed.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6395405/

 

Meditation Practice Amplifies Awareness of the Cause of an Event

psyjdc Leave a comment

Image may contain: night

Meditation Practice Amplifies Awareness of the Cause of an Event

 

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

 

“What is an illusion is when you are looking but not seeing completely, listening but also daydreaming. To walk around half perceiving and half in a daydream, this is to walk around in an illusion and in a dream. What is worse is when the dreams of the mind cloud perception.” –  Brian Miles

 

Meditation, by training and improving attention to everything that occurs, is thought to produce a greater awareness of cause and effect. This is particularly evident in recognizing when an event was caused by one’s own volitional actions. One way to measure this is called “Intentional binding.” It refers to the subjectively reported time compression that occurs between an intentional action and its outcome when compared to the timing of an action alone and of an event that does not depend upon an action” (Haggard, Clark and Kalogeras 2002). In other words, when an event is perceived to have been produced intentionally, the time between the cause and effect is experienced as shorter than if there was no intention involved.

 

It would be predicted, then, that if experienced meditators had better attentional ability that they should show greater “Intentional binding” than non-meditators; they should estimate less time between a cause and an effect when they are the initiator of the event than when they are not.. In today’s Research News article “Illusory Temporal Binding in Meditators.” See:

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1478243438866244/?type=3&theater

or see summary below or view the full text of the study at:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-016-0583-z/fulltext.html

Lush and colleagues examine this prediction. They recruited experienced meditators with on average 15 years of experience and a group of age and gender matched non-meditators. The participants either initiated the presentation of a tone by pressing a button which produced the tone a quarter of a second later or simply observed the tone presented by the computer. After a delay the participants move a clock hand to the time that they experienced the tone occurring. The difference between the actual time and the perceived time of the tone was measured. “Intentional binding” was measured by the difference between the errors for the intentional and the non-intentional conditions.

 

They found that meditators errors were significantly greater in estimating the time of occurrence of the tone as earlier when they initiated the tone than when they didn’t. This suggests greater “Intentional binding” for the meditators than the matched non-meditators. Although this is a fairly indirect way of measuring the individual’s ability to recognize the cause of an event, it suggests that meditation improves the individual’s ability to recognize intention. This, in turn, suggests that meditation training makes an individual more aware of agency, that is what caused and event to occur.

 

These results further document the improvements in attentional ability produced by meditation practice. In this case the attention to the cause of events occurring in their experience. Meditation practice appears to alter our mental processing of experience heightening our attention to and awareness of what is occurring around us. Since most modern people are constantly distracted and rarely in contact with what is actually happening around them in the present moment, meditation practice would appear to be an antidote to the modern disease of inattention to the present.

 

“Whether you’re interested in mindfulness or cognitive neuroscience, perception is at the heart of your work with others.  Helping people become aware of their perceptions assists them in counterbalancing a tendency to become awash with their affect.“ – Megan Van Meter

 

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 Twitter @MindfulResearch

 

Study Summary

 

Lush, P., Parkinson, J. & Dienes, Z. Illusory Temporal Binding in Meditators.  Mindfulness (2016) 7: 1416. doi:10.1007/s12671-016-0583-z

 

Abstract

We investigate conditions in which more accurate metacognition may lead to greater susceptibility to illusion and thus conditions under which mindfulness meditation may lead to less accurate perceptions. Specifically, greater awareness of intentions may lead to an illusory compression of time between a voluntary action and its outcome (“intentional binding”). Here, we report that experienced Buddhist mindfulness meditators rather than non-meditators display a greater illusory shift of the timing of an outcome toward an intentional action. Mindfulness meditation involves awareness of causal connections between different mental states, including intentions. We argue that this supports improvements in metacognition targeted at motor intentions. Changes in metacognitive ability may result in an earlier and less veridical experience of the timing of action outcomes either through increased access to sensorimotor pre-representations of an action outcome or by affording greater precision to action timing judgements. Furthermore, as intentional binding is an implicit measure of the sense of agency; these results also provide evidence that mindfulness meditators experience a stronger sense of agency.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-016-0583-z/fulltext.html

 

 

Change your Perception of Time with Mindfulness

psyjdc Leave a comment

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

 

 “taking time to be mindful and focusing fully on the present moment — in other words, actively noticing new things — can actually slow down our brain’s perception of time. And just as powerfully, mindless distraction can easily create the feeling that we’re losing whole hours, days and months.” – Carolyn Gregoir

 

There are times in life when time just seems to wiz by and others when it seems to creep. There are also times when it seems like a minute passing feels like 5 minutes and others when it feels like only a few seconds. In other words, our sense of the speed of time passing and the amount of time that has passed varies from occasion to occasion. One factor that effects the perception of time is the content of the interval and the frequency of events occurring. If the interval is relatively packed with events and stimuli, then the time period is overestimated, suggesting that time seemed to pass more slowly. If, on the other hand, there are few things occurring in the interval, then time is underestimated, suggesting that time seemed to pass more quickly.

 

Mindfulness training involves paying close attention to the contents of the present moment. This suggests that being mindful would enhance the perception of the amount of things occurring and would thus predict that the interval would appear longer than otherwise and that time would seem to pass more slowly. In today’s Research News article “Dispositional Mindfulness and Subjective Time in Healthy Individuals.” See:

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1276909505666306/?type=3&theater

or below or view the full text of the study at:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4878969/

Weiner and colleagues investigate these issues. They measured adult participants for mindfulness, impulsivity, mood and rumination and asked them to estimate the duration of an interval and the speed of time passage under different experimental conditions of actual duration (32 or 128 seconds) and contents of the interval (number presented every 4 seconds or 16 seconds). They were also asked in another similar task to stop the presentation of numbers when either 30 or 60 seconds had elapsed.

 

They found that in general participants tended to overestimate the duration of the interval regardless of its actual length and that the greater the contents of the interval the faster time seemed to pass. They also found that participants, when asked, tended to produce intervals longer than the 30 or 60 seconds that were called for and that the amount of error was larger with the 60 second duration and with less content. As has been seen in other research, participants who were more mindful, were less impulsive, ruminated less, and were less depressed. They also found that the higher the mindfulness facets of observing and acting with awareness, the longer the estimated duration.

 

These results are interesting and suggest that, in a laboratory setting people tend to overestimate the duration of a time interval. It would be interesting to know if this were also true in “real world” settings also. The results also suggest that being mindful tended to make the intervals seem even longer, but that time seemed to pass more quickly. This would seem to fit with the fact that meditators frequently report that they felt like they meditated longer than they actually did. Mindfulness may produce this elongation of time estimation by making the stimuli occurring during the interval more salient and interesting. The fill up of the interval in this way may make it seem that more has happened and thus more time has passed. It remains for future research to clarify this issue.

 

So, change your perception of time with mindfulness.

 

“Mindfulness allows people to appreciate their surroundings and can lead to the feeling that time is passing more slowly.” – Steven Meyers

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

This and other Contemplative Studies posts are also available on Google+ https://plus.google.com/106784388191201299496/posts

 

Study Summary

Weiner, L., Wittmann, M., Bertschy, G., & Giersch, A. (2016). Dispositional Mindfulness and Subjective Time in Healthy Individuals. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 786. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00786

 

Abstract

How a human observer perceives duration depends on the amount of events taking place during the timed interval, but also on psychological dimensions, such as emotional-wellbeing, mindfulness, impulsivity, and rumination. Here we aimed at exploring these influences on duration estimation and passage of time judgments. One hundred and seventeen healthy individuals filled out mindfulness (FFMQ), impulsivity (BIS-11), rumination (RRS), and depression (BDI-sf) questionnaires. Participants also conducted verbal estimation and production tasks in the multiple seconds range. During these timing tasks, subjects were asked to read digits aloud that were presented on a computer screen. Each condition of the timing tasks differed in terms of the interval between the presentation of the digits, i.e., either short (4-s) or long (16-s). Our findings suggest that long empty intervals (16-s) are associated with a relative underestimation of duration, and to a feeling that the time passes slowly, a seemingly paradoxical result. Also, regarding more mindful individuals, such a dissociation between duration estimation and passage of time judgments was found, but only when empty intervals were short (4-s). Relatively speaking, more mindful subjects showed an increased overestimation of durations, but felt that time passed more quickly. These results provide further evidence for the dissociation between duration estimation and the feeling of the passage of time. We discuss these results in terms of an alerting effect when empty intervals are short and events are more numerous, which could mediate the effect of dispositional mindfulness.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4885856/

 

How Long is the Present Moment

psyjdc Leave a comment

‘the prototype of all conceived times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible’ (James 1890)

In our contemplative practice we are instructed to pay attention entirely to the present moment. There is no instruction as to what exactly that means as it would seem to be self-evident. On reflection, however, it can be seen that it is not that simple. What we experience as the present is not an infinitely small point in time. Rather it appears to have duration. It seemingly lasts from briefly in the past to briefly in the future.

We can conceive of the present moment as of fixed duration in which stimuli arise and fall away. It is always the same, but its contents are constantly changing. We are aware of now and what is happening in now is impermanent and in perpetual flux. In other words, time appears to be moving through the now rather than the present moment moving through time.

In today’s Research News article “Moments in Time”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1028156750541584/?type=1&theater

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196211/pdf/fnint-05-00066.pdf

Marc Wittmann asserts that before we can answer that question of how long is now we must first define exactly what we mean by the present moment. He reviews three different ideas of the present moment; functional moment, experienced moment, and mental presence.

The functional moment is defined usually by the threshold for detecting two separate events in time. For example telling that two sounds spaced apart are actually two sounds rather than a singular sound. It is the time when separate events appear to be fused together into a single event. There are various ways to measure this and the estimates vary greatly depending upon the method, but generally the functional moment lasts somewhere between 30 to 300 milliseconds, .03 to .30 seconds.

The experienced moment is the subjective present. It is an experienced now within an ongoing stream of events. For example while listening to music a note does not stand alone in consciousness but is joined by the prior note and the expected future note. In speech, each word is perceived in reference to past and expected words, as in the phrase “how are you”. When we hear “are” we process it recognizing that it’s in reference to a question, “How” and due to our learning we also experience the “are” with the expectation of a following word “you”. This experienced moment has duration of somewhere up to 3 seconds.

Mental Presence is defined as a temporal platform of multiple seconds within which an individual is aware of himself/herself and the environment, where sensory–motor perception, cognition, and emotion are interconnected features of representation leading to phenomenal experience. It is the temporal boundaries of perception that allow us to hold events in present experience. There is no fixed time duration of temporal presence. Rather it appears to continuously change phasing into and out of other mental presences.

What does it matter as to how long is the present moment. It matters to scientists and philosophers who are attempting to understand it within the confines of dualistic language and logic. The present moment for contemplative practices is probably more akin to mental presence.

But to the practitioner of contemplation the present moment is simply experienced. It does not have to be compartmentalized, measured, or described. It just is. And that is enough for our purposes of staying in the present moment.

CMCS