For people with recurrent depression, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) reduces the risk of depressive relapse within a 60-week follow-up period compared with usual care or other active treatments, including antidepressants. A meta-analysis of individual patient data from 9 randomized trials involving 1258 patients (mean age 47.1 years, 75% female) found that those receiving MBCT had a 31% lower risk of relapse versus no MBCT (hazard ratio 0.69), and a 21% lower risk versus other active treatments (hazard ratio 0.79). Sociodemographic and psychiatric variables did not significantly modify the treatment effect, but greater severity of depressive symptoms before treatment was associated with a larger benefit from MBCT.
Traditional cognitive psychology treats the environment as a source of information that does not alter basic cognitive processes, relying on controlled lab experiments with precisely timed stimuli. New research shows the environment does influence cognition, prompting proposals like cognitive ethology, which draws inspiration from real-world phenomena before testing them in the lab. Cognitive ethology appeals to embodied cognition for its focus on agent-environment relationships but retains traditional assumptions about cognitive processes. The authors argue cognitive ethology should adopt the ontology of less radical embodied cognition, leading to new methodologies such as comparing real-world and lab studies to understand how cognition depends on environments.