Adding background music to loving-kindness meditation can increase low-arousal and pro-social positive emotions without making the practice harder. In a five-day intervention, 200 participants were randomly assigned to six groups that experienced meditation with music containing only harmony, music with both harmony and melody, or no music on different days. Music boosted low-arousal and pro-social positive emotions compared to silence, but there was no difference between the two types of music. Music did not affect difficulties such as lack of concentration or lack of pro-social attitudes. Practice over days influenced medium-arousal positive emotions and concentration difficulty, though results varied across groups.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) therapy, added to usual care, improves psychological outcomes for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients with moderate depression. In a retrospective analysis of 131 patients, those receiving MBSR showed significantly greater improvements in depression, anxiety, perceived stress, quality of life, and mindfulness awareness after eight weeks compared to a control group. Patients in the MBSR group also reported higher treatment satisfaction, willingness to recommend the treatment, and perceived benefit. The findings suggest MBSR offers adjunctive therapeutic value for this population.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for insomnia (MBCT-I) reduced insomnia severity in breast cancer survivors compared with a waitlist control group. Improvements were sustained at post-intervention, 3-month, and 6-month follow-ups. Among participants with moderate or severe insomnia at baseline, 59.6% improved to no insomnia or subclinical insomnia at 6 months. Actigraphy measures showed decreased sleep onset latency and waking after sleep onset, and increased total sleep time and sleep efficiency. Mindfulness also increased more in the MBCT-I group at all follow-up points. The authors conclude that MBCT-I may be an efficacious non-pharmacologic intervention for improving sleep quality in this population.