Mindfulness
August 18, 2016
Bethany E Kok, Tania Singer
154 citations
Different meditation practices produce distinct short-term psychological changes. In a 9-month training program with 229 mid-life adults, body scan meditation most increased awareness of internal body sensations and decreased thinking about thoughts, loving-kindness meditation most increased warmth and positive thoughts about others, and observing-thought meditation most increased awareness of one's own thinking processes. All practices, including breathing meditation, improved mood, energy, and present-moment focus while reducing distraction. The findings suggest each meditation type has a unique psychological fingerprint, which can guide their use in specific intervention contexts and populations.
Social and Personality Psychology Compass
January 1, 2013
Bethany E Kok, Christian E. Waugh, Barbara L. Fredrickson
39 citations
Meditation practices offer a promising method for studying how mental states influence physical health, particularly immune function, cardiovascular health, and pain perception. This review describes how meditation may work by enhancing emotion regulation, self-regulation, or repeatedly inducing specific mental states like love or meta-cognitive awareness. The field needs large randomized controlled trials with active control groups and dual-blind designs to test whether changes in cognitive and affective processes from meditation directly cause improvements in physical health. Meditation is a potentially powerful tool for understanding mind-body interactions.
JAMA Psychiatry
February 1, 2017
Bethany E Kok, Tania Singer
Contemplative practices performed in pairs (dyads) increased social connectedness as much as or more than solitary meditation, and participants engaged with them similarly. In a 9-month trial, 226 healthy adults in Germany completed three 3-month modules: presence (breathing meditation and body scan), affect (loving-kindness meditation and affect dyad), and perspective (observing-thoughts meditation and perspective dyad). Compliance was similar across all practices, though motivation was higher for solitary meditation than for dyads. Social closeness increased during and over time for both dyads, with the affect dyad showing steeper increases in self-disclosure. Contemplative dyads offer a new way to target social connectedness, which is often deficient in loneliness and psychopathologies.
International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology
July 1, 2015
Anna-Lena Lumma, Bethany E Kok, Tania Singer
Meditation is not always relaxing; some types require mental effort and increase physiological arousal. In a year-long training study, three meditation types—breathing, loving-kindness, and observing-thoughts—were practiced daily for three months each. Loving-kindness and observing-thoughts meditation produced higher heart rate and greater perceived effort than breathing meditation. Over time, heart rate and likeability increased while heart rate variability and effort decreased. The increases in heart rate and decreases in heart rate variability were larger for loving-kindness and observing-thoughts meditation. These findings suggest that meditations aimed at compassion and meta-cognitive skills involve effort and arousal, which may help tailor meditation recommendations to specific contexts.
Psychological Science
July 1, 2013
Bethany E Kok, Kimberly A. Coffey, Michael Cohn et al.
A longitudinal field experiment tested whether generating positive emotions through loving-kindness meditation can improve physical health by strengthening perceptions of social connections. Participants randomly assigned to the meditation group showed increased positive emotions compared to a waiting-list control group, an effect that was stronger for those with higher baseline vagal tone, a measure of physical health. Increased positive emotions led to further increases in vagal tone, and this effect was mediated by greater perceptions of social connections. The findings suggest an upward-spiral dynamic in which positive emotions, social connections, and physical health mutually reinforce each other.