Mindfulness Findings

• Research has shown that mindfulness is:
  • Negatively associated with depression and anxiety (Brown and Ryan, 2003)
  • Positively related to positive affect (Brown and Ryan, 2003)
  • Negatively related to negative affect (Brown and Ryan, 2003)
  • Positively associated with life satisfaction (Brown and Ryan, 2003)
  • Higher self esteem (Brown and Ryan, 2003)
  • Higher vitality (Brown and Ryan, 2003)
  • Greater self actualization (Brown and Ryan, 2003)
  • Fulfillment of basic psychological needs (competence, relatedness, autonomy) (Brown and Ryan, 2003)
  • Inversely related to self-reported physical symptoms (Brown and Ryan, 2003)
  • Psychological well being (Baer et al, 2008)
  • Lower distress; higher well-being; lower levels of maladaptive emotion regulation; associated with clarity of feelings; cognitive flexibility, problem analysis (Feldman, Hayes, Kumar, Greeson, Laurenceau, 2007)
     
• With children, mindfulness improves:  
  • Attention, social skills, behavior (Napoli et al, 2005)
  • Internalizing, externalizing behavior, anxiety, depression (Lee et al, 2008)
  • Sleep (Bootzin and Stevens, 2005)
  • Attention (Zylowska et al 2007)
  • Mental health, stress, psychological symptoms, self-esteem (Biegel et al 2009)
  • Anxiety, social skills, academic performance (Beauchemin et al 2008)
  • Attention, internalizing and externalizing behavior problems, anxiety, academic performance (e.g. Beauchemin, Hutchins and Patterson, 2008; Semple, Lee, Rosa and Miller, 2009)
  • Improve social skills and school related functioning (Napoli, Krech, Holley, 2005)
     
• est practices from the literature and the developmental social cognitive neuroscience perspective include:
  • indfulness training would be predicted to be superior to realization training or cognitive training alone by virtue of targeting both top-down and bottom-up influences on self-regulation (Zelazo Lyons 2012).
  • To compensate for children’s limited self-regulation skills, the lessons are shorter for younger participants, involve more movement based activities, and have simplified instructions. Teachers may use props or concrete metaphors to help children understand the goals of mindfulness exercises (Zelazo Lyons 2012).
     
• A few additional data-driven reads:
  • Berkeley Institute for Greater Good compiled a great research list of youth mindfulness studies
  • research website, Mind UCLA, and Mindefulness in Education Network (MiEN) are quite useful as well
  • And finally, here are interesting NYT articles on mindfulness: focus, ADHD, and Silicon Valley
     

• Add in full citations list