Eye tracking study of mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Randomized controlled trial |
|---|---|
| Interventions | Mindfulness meditation Loving-kindness meditation Physics video |
| Duration | 10-minute meditation exercise |
| Measures | Interpersonal Reactivity Inventory (IRI), Five-facet-Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), eye tracking task, affective empathy question, moral expansiveness questionnaires |
| Topics | Meditation |
| Key findings | Proposes that brief mindfulness or loving-kindness meditation will increase attention to affectively informative face regions and affective empathy relative to a control video, and that loving-kindness meditation will be more effective than mindfulness meditation for dwell time on those regions. No results are reported. |
Abstract
An experimental research design has been selected for this research study. The research design will assist in addressing the research aims and questions because it will give us the data assessing a causal relationship. Participants will be recruited via the School of Psychology’s research participation system (SONA) and contacted via email. The study will take place in one hour in the Denson laboratory in the School of Psychology building of the University of New South Wales. Upon arrival in the laboratory, participants will be asked for consent and consequently randomly allocated to an intervention condition (mindfulness meditation: MM or loving-kindness meditation: LKM) or the control condition (Physics video). Participants will fill out the first set of questionnaires including the demographics, the Interpersonal Reactivity Inventory (IRI; empathy; Davis, 1980; Ingoglia et al., 2016) and Five-facet-Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ; mindfulness; Bear et al., 2006). Following that, participants in the intervention groups will receive a brief 10-minute meditation (MM or LKM) exercise. The control group will watch an informational video about a physics topic. Participants will be performing an eye tracking task during which they are presented with different graphic images of suffering people of different genders and ethnicities for 1.5 seconds followed by a question measuring affective empathy: “How much do you feel for this person?”. Participants will be viewing 300 images. For exploratory purposes, the eye tracking task will be followed by two questionnaires on moral expansiveness. Participants are debriefed and thanked for their participation. The research aims to examine the effects of different types of mindfulness interventions on empathy and attention. The research hypotheses that this research seeks to address are: Hypothesis 1: A brief mindfulness (MM) or loving-kindness (LKM) intervention will increase empathy attention towards affectively informative regions (i.e., eyes and mouth over other face areas; people over backgrounds). Hypothesis 2: A brief mindfulness (MM) or loving-kindness (LKM) intervention will increase affective empathy more than the control group. Hypothesis 3: LKM will be more effective in increasing dwell time on the previously mentioned affectively informative regions compared to MM.