Metacognitive awareness is a cognitive set in which negative thoughts/feelings are experienced as mental events, rather than as the self. The authors hypothesized that (a) reduced metacognitive awareness would be associated with vulnerability to depression and (b) cognitive therapy (CT) and mindfulness-based CT (MBCT) would reduce depressive relapse by increasing metacognitive awareness. They...
This study evaluated mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), a group intervention designed to train recovered recurrently depressed patients to disengage from dysphoria-activated depressogenic thinking that may mediate relapse/recurrence. Recovered recurrently depressed patients (n = 145) were randomized to continue with treatment as usual or, in addition, to receive MBCT....
Forty male undergraduate volunteers were assigned to one of four groups. During the treatment period, the control group was asked to “just sit there.” The deactivation demand, neutral demand, and activation demand groups were shown a videotape demonstrating the Zen meditation exercise “counting breaths” and modeling and suggesting relaxation outcome, no specific outcome, and arousal outcome for...
Meditation may have clinical application in stress-related disorders or it may alleviate the adverse effects of normal daily stress, depending on the resiliency of demonstrated state effects. The significance of meditation as a stress intervention appropriate for daily life might prove major if these meditation state effects carry over and transform the meditator in a more permanent way,...
In 1959, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi introduced to America an exercise involving sitting quietly twice daily and passively attending to a special thought called a This exercise is called transcendental meditation (TM) and has since been taught to at least 600,000 persons. One possible reason for TM's popularity is Maharishi's claim that the technique is a natural and effective cure for mental...