Mindfulness as cognitive and emotion regulation strategy to promote resilience in children
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Final Report Abstract
The present project encompasses two studies that investigated relations of mindfulness, executive functioning (EF), emotion regulation and well-being in preadolescent samples, combining self- and other-report questionnaires with objective measures of behavioral performance and event-related potentials. The first, correlational study, examined mindfulness in terms of the dispositional tendency to act mindfully in everyday life without previous mindfulness training. Initial results show that dispositional mindfulness is positively associated with indicators of EF, unrelated with emotion regulation, and positively associated with well-being in terms of decreased negative affect. Second, a longitudinal study with a quasi-experimental actively controlled design comprising three dates of measurements compares the development of mindfulness-experienced pupils to a mindfulness-inexperienced sample that received a positive psychology intervention for the first time. When the mindfulness-experienced group was compared with the mindfulnessinexperienced group at the first round of assessments, a point where the mindfulnessexperienced group was already engaged in a mindfulness practice of several years, indicators of emotion regulation and EF suggested benefits for the mindfulness-experienced group, whereas there were no group differences regarding dispositional mindfulness and well-being. When groups were compared with regard to their development between the first two dates of measurements, both groups were found to improve their well-being in terms of positive affect. Only the mindfulness-experienced group improved indicators of EF whereas the mindfulness-inexperienced group deteriorated here. This pattern could suggest that both mindfulness training and a positive psychology intervention are associated with improved well-being, but that only mindfulness-training achieves this benefit via increased EF. Interestingly, children with an established mindfulness practice of several years did not score higher than mindfulness-inexperienced children on a self-report questionnaire measuring dispositional mindfulness. So it seems that dispositional mindfulness, defined as tendency to act mindfully in everyday life without prior mindfulness practice, is not something that necessarily rises as a consequence of mindfulness training. Future research should carefully compare dispositional mindfulness with qualities that result from mindfulness training. Also, mechanisms that underlie mindfulness-based effects deserve more attention in the future. The hypothesis that mindfulness achieves its benefits via improved EF and emotion regulation is not unequivocally supported by the present data. Although mindfulness was consistently related to at least some indicators of improved EF, emotion regulation and wellbeing were not entirely clearly associated with mindfulness (however when there were effects, they were always in the expected direction). Therefore, it appears promising to examine the interrelationships of mindfulness, EF, emotion-regulation and well-being in larger samples and over an extended period of time to shed more light on underlying mechanisms of mindfulness. The present project underpins the idea that mindfulness training can be a valuable method to support preadolescents’ development, in so far as it seems to be an effective means to promote preadolescents’ EF, and possibly emotion regulation and well-being too.
