Abstract
Mindfulness-based interventions have proved effective in reducing various clinical symptoms and in improving general mental health and well-being. The investigation of the mechanisms of therapeutic change needs methods for assessment of mindfulness. Existing self-report measures have, however, been strongly criticized on various grounds, including distortion of the original concept, response bias, and other. We propose a psychophysiological method for the assessment of the mindfulness learned through time-limited mindfulness-based therapy by people who undergo meditation training for the first time. We use the individual pre-post-therapy changes (dERPi) in the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) recorded in a passive meditation task as a measure of increased mindfulness. dERPi is computed through multivariate assessment of individual participant's ERPs. We tested the proposed method in a group of about 70 recurrently depressed participants, randomly assigned in 1.7:1 ratio to mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) or cognitive therapy (CT). The therapy outcome was measured by the long-term change (dDS) relative to baseline in the depression symptoms (DS) assessed weekly, for 60 weeks, by an online self-report questionnaire. We found a strong, highly significant, negative correlation (r = −0.55) between dERPi (mean = 0.4) and dDS (mean = −0.7) in the MBCT group. Compared to this result, the relationship between dDS and the other (self-report) measures of mindfulness we used was substantially weaker and not significant. So was also the relationship between dERPi and dDS in the CT group. The interpretation of dERPi as a measure of increased mindfulness was further supported by positive correlations between dERPi and the other measures of mindfulness. In this study, we also replicated a previous result, namely, the increase (dLCNV) of the late contingent negative variation (LCNV) of the ERP in the MBCT group, but not in the control group (in this case, CT). We interpreted dLCNV as a measure of increased meditative concentration. The relationship between dLCNV and dDS was, however, very week, which suggests that concentration might be relatively unimportant for the therapeutic effect of mindfulness. The proposed psychophysiological method could become an important component of a “mindfulness test battery” together with self-report questionnaires and other newly developed instruments.
Highlights
Mindfulness as a general concept and mindfulness meditation as a therapeutic method have become increasingly popular in the last decades and the number of research papers on the subject has grown exponentially (Williams and Kabat-Zinn, 2011)
After eight weeks of mindfulnessbased cognitive therapy (MBCT), the late contingent negative variation (LCNV) component of the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to an auditory test stimulus was significantly increased relative to both the pre-therapy baseline and a wait list control group
We proposed a psychological measure of mindfulness, dERPi, as an alternative to the established selfreport measures (Baer, 2011; Grossman and Van Dam, 2011)
Summary
Mindfulness as a general concept and mindfulness meditation as a therapeutic method have become increasingly popular in the last decades and the number of research papers on the subject has grown exponentially (Williams and Kabat-Zinn, 2011). The investigation of the mechanisms by which these therapeutic changes occur requires assessment methods, and, several self-report questionnaires have been developed for the purpose of measuring mindfulness (Baer, 2011) This approach has, been strongly criticized on various grounds, and it has been pointed out that existing questionnaires might not provide valid measures of mindfulness as defined by Buddhist sources and adopted by MBSR/MBCT (Grossman and Van Dam, 2011). Our definition emphasizes the experiential nature of mindfulness and the inherent difficulty of putting into words something that, must be practiced in order to be understood It allows for an arbitrary length of the verbal description that would attempt to convey the meaning of the concept—originally, the Buddha’s discourse on “The four establishments of mindfulness” (Bodhi, 2005; Ñanamoli and Bodhi, 2009); more recently, the MBSR and MBCT treatment protocols (Kabat-Zinn, 1990; Segal et al, 2002). It just utilizes the fact that formal meditation provides an excellent opportunity to measure mindfulness in a controlled laboratory setting
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