An 8-week mindfulness meditation training reduced self-serving dishonest behavior in a card game where participants were tempted to lie for money. Trained participants deceived significantly less after training, while a waitlisted control group showed no change. Self-report measures showed increases in attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and non-reactivity to inner experience among trained participants. The amount of weekly meditation practice predicted moral behavior change, especially in those with the highest ability to regulate attention toward internal bodily signals. The results suggest that mindfulness meditation decreases dishonesty and heightens awareness of bodily and emotional states.
Healthy Italian adolescents who completed eight weeks of either mindfulness-oriented meditation or autogenic training showed increased cooperativeness and reduced emotional symptoms. The more participants' cooperativeness rose, the more their emotional symptoms fell. Both mind-body interventions fostered a cooperative attitude and helped regulate emotions, suggesting they may protect youth well-being and psychosocial adjustment in school settings.
A systematic review of 24 studies examined how Mindfulness Meditation (MM) affects mind wandering (MW). Most pre-post intervention studies showed that at least two weeks of MM practice reduced MW and limited its negative effects on cognitive tasks. Cross-sectional studies found that expert meditators reported less MW and showed decreased Default Mode Network activity during meditation and at rest compared to non-meditators. The reviewed studies varied widely in design, outcome measures, and interventions. The authors call for further research to replicate findings and explore how meditation influences the qualitative characteristics of MW.
A 7-week Mindfulness Oriented Meditation (MOM) training reduced dissociative tendencies, increased dispositional mindfulness, and improved interoceptive awareness (not-worrying, self-regulation, body listening) in healthy adults compared to a waiting-list control group. Greater increases in mindfulness skills correlated with greater reductions in dissociation and improvements in interoceptive awareness. More home meditation practice was linked to larger gains in mindfulness skills. The findings suggest mindfulness meditation may cultivate voluntary processes that provide psychological safety and integration, contrasting with the involuntary nature of dissociation.
Different mindfulness techniques produce distinct effects on mental rumination and time perspective. In an 8-week study, 75 healthy young adults were assigned to mindful breathing, body scan, observing-thoughts meditation, or an active control group. All meditation groups improved mindfulness skills more than the control group. Mindful breathing specifically reduced brooding and increased a positive view of the future compared to the other techniques. These differential effects suggest that tailoring meditation practices could enhance interventions aimed at reducing maladaptive thinking and fostering optimism.