Abstract
This experimental study investigated whether implicitly priming mindfulness would facilitate psychological and cortisol recovery after undergoing a standardized psychological stressor. After completing baseline measures of well-being, all participants (N = 91) completed a public speaking stress task, were implicitly primed with “mindfulness” or “neutral” concepts using a scrambled sentence task, and finally, reported their situational well-being and provided cortisol samples. Simple moderation regression analyses revealed that the implicit mindfulness condition had significant beneficial effects for participants with low trait mindfulness. These participants reported higher situational self-esteem as well as less negative affect, perceived stress, and self-reported physiological arousal than their counterparts in the control condition. Cortisol analyses revealed that participants in the implicit mindfulness condition, regardless of level of trait mindfulness, showed a greater decline in cortisol during the early recovery stage compared to those in the control condition. Overall, results suggest that implicitly activating mindfulness can mitigate the psychological and physiological effects of a social stressor.
Highlights
The topic of mindfulness, its benefits, and the multiple ways it is practiced, has gained popularity over the last few decades
Preliminary analyses indicated that baseline levels of situational well-being did not differ between experimental conditions, F’s (1,89) < 2.03 p’s > 0.157
Analyses indicated that negative affect and self-reported physiological arousal significantly increased from baseline to post-stressor for everyone, F(1,90) = 153.98, p < 0.001 and F(1,91) = 112.78, p < 0.001, respectively, indicating that the speech task was an effective stressor
Summary
The topic of mindfulness, its benefits, and the multiple ways it is practiced, has gained popularity over the last few decades. Commonly viewed as an exercise of working toward a “mindful state of mind” through repeated practice (e.g., mindfulness-based meditation, mindfulness breathing), mindfulness is according to some authors, inherently a state that can vary both within persons and between individuals (Brown and Ryan, 2003). In this sense, mindfulness refers to individual differences in people’s inherent predisposition to mindfulness (i.e., trait mindfulness). It has been suggested by some authors that mindfulness is a capacity present to some degree in all people, regardless of level of past training or practice (Goldstein, 2002; Brown and Ryan, 2003; Kabat-Zinn, 2003; Brown et al, 2007)
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