AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF MEDITATION

Abstract

The present study was concerned with investigating the description, production, and utilization aspects of meditation.It was found that the meditative state of consciousness could be described by a concentration which, with practice, increasingly minimized the intrusion of distracting thoughts; and relative to a control group, when thoughts did occur, they tended to be categorized as present-oriented rather than either past-or future-oriented.The meditative state was also characterized by greater physical relaxation as compared to a control group.With regard to utilization effects outside the sitting sessions themselves, meditation enhanced perceptual performance in a task which required both concentration and the ability to minimize an interfering stimulus background.To delineate the factors involved in producing meditation effects, mental concentration and physically sitting still were considered to be two of the most common characteristics of meditation practice.To determine whether these two characteristics had differential effects, subjects were divided into a meditation group and a control group.Both groups physically sat still during the sessions but only the meditation group concentrated on a breathcounting task.Since the two groups performed differently on the various measures mentioned above, it was concluded that one important factor in producing such effects was the concentrative aspect in the meditation group.