Eight weeks of mindfulness training reduced anxiety and depressive symptoms in a non-clinical sample of 80 adults, with effects lasting at least three months. The training also shifted attention: participants became more attentive to happy faces and less attentive to sad faces compared to a control group. The change in attention to sad faces partially explained the reduction in depression immediately after training, but this attentional mechanism played only a limited role in symptom improvement overall. The study suggests mindfulness improves emotional symptoms through multiple pathways, not solely by altering attention to emotional faces.
A 5-week EmotionCore mindfulness training program improved adaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies, emotional intelligence, and trait mindfulness in undergraduates, with gains maintained at one-month follow-up. Improvements in emotion regulation and emotional intelligence fully and sequentially mediated the increase in trait mindfulness. Participants with high baseline anxiety or depression showed greater reductions in anxiety and depression after training compared to those with low baseline symptoms, indicating the program is especially beneficial for high-risk populations.
A five-week emotion-targeted mindfulness training program improved working memory for facial expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, and neutrality, but not fear, in a study of 120 participants. The improvements lasted at least one month. Drift-diffusion modeling revealed that the training increased the efficiency of information processing (drift rate) across all emotional categories, and these increases correlated with accuracy gains. The findings suggest mindfulness training enhances both the accuracy and speed of visual working memory processing, independent of the specific emotion displayed.