Alex Barnard
Recently the media has been
paying more attention to mindfulness and how it affects mental health. Mindfulness
being a state of mind reached by focusing on the present. The most common
affect people have found for mindfulness is that it helps lower stress.
Because of this rise in popularity studies have been created to further look at the effects mindfulness can have on mental health. The focus of this blog is on one paper that looked at how our perception can change the effects of mindfulness. For this paper they had participants write about how they think mindfulness affected them after they completed a jigsaw puzzle. The paper involved two separate studies each with separate groups.
Study 1:
Group A:
o Half were told a history of jigsaw puzzles.
o
Half were told the same history and informed the
jigsaw they will complete was mindful.
Group B:
o
Half were told a history of jigsaw puzzles.
o
Half were given genuine mindfulness instructions
to follow while completing the jigsaw puzzle.
Study 2:
Group C:
o
Half were told a history of jigsaw puzzles.
o
Half were given genuine mindfulness instructions
to follow with a positive impression.
Group D:
o
Half were told a history of jigsaw puzzles.
o
Half were given genuine mindfulness instructions
to follow with a negative impression.
Before and after each study the
researchers looked at the mental health states of the participants through some
questionnaires. Since this was done through questionnaires the impression of
how the participants think the mindfulness affected them would be more noticeable.
This effect is known as the expectancy effect, where people tend to report on
results they think researchers want to see. This can also show up as the
placebo effect, where the patient thinks something is having an effect causes
an effect to actually happen.
The
results showed some evidence for the placebo effect as patients just told the
puzzle was mindful had lower stress levels. The genuine instruction group had even
lower stress levels, however. Because they were given genuine instructions their
belief might have been stronger, with a bigger placebo effect. This shows how
our mind can affect how mindfulness impacts us. The second study showed a
positive impression with the instructions was more related to lower stress more
than the negative impression. The half of each group given a history of jigsaws
also tended to have lower stress levels than the negative impression group.
Since
even using the word mindfulness can affect the results it might be best to
avoid using it in future studies. Like everything else mindfulness is affected
by what we think about it. It works better if we think it’s good for us and
worse if we think it’s bad. Since most people have probably heard about
mindfulness before when conducting studies on the topic it will be best to keep
it vague. By not mentioning mindfulness we can try to avoid these effects to
find more clear information on the benefits of mindfulness. This is good for research
and all but what about the practice of mindfulness itself? Well as the study
suggests the best results one could get from mindfulness is approaching it with
a positive view. Fortunately, placebo effects are mostly a concern within
research for finding clear data. If you’re just looking to lower your stress through
the use of mindfulness the best thing to do would be to just approach it
positively.
References
Ghanbari Noshari, M., Kempton, H. M., & Kreplin, U. (2022). Mindfulness or expectancy? The label of mindfulness leads to expectancy effects. Counselling & Psychotherapy Research, https://doi.org/10.1002/capr.12589
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