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Personalising Practice Using Preferences for Meditation Anchor Modality.

Thomas Anderson, Norman A. S. Farb

Frontiers in Psychology December 11, 2018 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02521 (opens in new tab)

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Study at a glance

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Characteristics Experimental study Peer reviewed
Sample size 82
Population Participants engaging in brief guided meditations (meditation-naive at baseline)
Duration 10-minute practices within three modalities
Topics Meditation
Keywords Attention Preference Motivation Mbi Personalisation Heart-rate
Key findings Preference for meditative attentional anchors varied by sensory modality: 49% preferred the breath, 30% an auditory phrase, and 21% a visual image. Pre-practice motivation and anchor modality predicted preference, and cardiac responses were positively associated with preference. Over half of participants changed their preference after experience, ending partial to a different anchor than their initial bias.

Abstract

Many people are starting to establish contemplative practices and Mindfulness-Based Interventions have become quite popular. While Mindfulness-Based Interventions positively impact well-being, drop-out and lack of practice-maintenance plagues these interventions. Such adherence issues may reveal a lack of fit between participant partiality for attentional anchors of meditative practice and the intervention's use of the breath as the anchor of attention. No study had yet compared partiality towards practices using anchors from different sensory modalities (e.g., auditory and visual) thus the present study examined such individual differences, sharing resources on the Open Science Framework. Participants (N = 82) engaged 10-min practices within three modalities (somatosensory, auditory, and visual) and partiality towards these meditations was modelled. Partiality differences did exist: 49% preferred the breath, 30% the auditory-phrase, and 21% the visual-image. Pre-practice motivation and anchor-modality predicted partiality while cardiac responses were also positively associated with partiality. Preferences were updated through experience and over half of participants left the experiment partial to a different anchor than their initial meditation-naïve bias. Tangible next-steps are discussed, including integrating additional anchor modalities into existing interventions by offering brief practices with a variety of anchors. Suggestions are made for increasing post-training contact using email-automation to answer central practice-maintenance questions, including whether and which contemplative benefits are predicated on continued practice.

Comparable studies

Other experimental studies on meditation, most cited first.

Study Year Design Participants
The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Cancer patients (clinical intervention study) 2003 Mixed methods: scale development, correlational, quasi-experimental, laboratory, experience-sampling, and clinical intervention study
Loving-kindness meditation increases social connectedness. 2008 Controlled laboratory experiment
Mindfulness and mind-wandering: Finding convergence through opposing constructs. 2012 Two studies: correlational study and experimental study
Mental Training Enhances Attentional Stability: Neural and Behavioral Evidence 2009 Experimental study
Mindfulness meditation and substance use in an incarcerated population. Incarcerated population 2006 Quasi-experimental with treatment-as-usual control condition

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