A Brief Mindfulness Meditation Intervention Could Increase Retention of Medical Health Information: An Analogue Study
Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Study design: Clinical Trial
Abstract: This analogue study was conducted to examine the potential benefit of incorporating a brief mindfulness meditation exercise into patient-education interventions, such as decision aids (DAs). A sample of 41 undergraduate psychology students (M_age=24.0) was randomly assigned to either a brief mindfulness condition or a control condition, whereby they either engaged in a brief mindfulness exercise or listened to an audio book. They were then exposed to visually and auditorily presented information about skin cancer designed to simulate a health education intervention and immediately tested on their retention of this material. The results provided support for the primary hypothesis of the study; subjects engaged in brief mindfulness scored higher than those in the control condition on a test covering information about skin cancer, controlling for prior level of mindfulness experience and knowledge about skin cancer (p=.03; Partial η^2=.13). However, contrary to the secondary hypotheses, these beneficial effects were not mediated by changes in positive and negative affect, measured on the PANAS scale. This innovative approach suggests that brief mindfulness meditation could improve the effectiveness of patient-education interventions by increasing the amount of information processed and retained.
Source: Skemman
Author: Arnar Guðjón Skúlason
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2399373328