Numerous studies have linked dispositional mindfulness to enhanced emotion regulation. The present research examined dispositional mindfulness as a predictor of emotion regulation in social affective contexts. Participants completed passive viewing and Emotional Go/No-Go tasks involving social affective stimuli (happy, neutral, and fearful facial expressions). Event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral responses were examined to discern whether dispositional mindfulness predicted differential neural and behavioral responses indexing attention to, awareness of, and inhibitory control over automatic responses to affective social stimuli. Dispositional mindfulness predicted larger (more negative) N100, N200 and No-Go N200 amplitudes during the Emotional Go/No-Go task, but was not associated with amplitude of the Late Positive Potential during the passive viewing task. Dispositional mindfulness also predicted faster response times (RT) to target stimuli that were not attributable to a speed-accuracy tradeoff. No relations were found between mindfulness and RT variability nor accuracy. Implications for understanding mindfulness and early processes of social emotion regulation are discussed.

The present research examined if mindfulness reduced negativity bias on measures of attitude formation and cognitive style, as a potential explanation for the beneficial effects of mindfulness on emotional disturbance. Two studies were conducted. Study One was correlational and found that trait mindfulness inversely correlated with measures of negative cognitive style, and that the latter partially mediated an inverse association between mindfulness and predisposition to depression and anxiety. Further, correlations between mindfulness and both positive attitude formation and optimism hinted at a potential positivity bias. Study Two extended these findings using a randomized experimental design comparing a mindfulness induction to an unfocused attention control condition. The mindfulness condition demonstrated a positivity bias in attitude formation and increased optimism compared to the control condition, but did not demonstrate bias in attitude generalization. Potential explanations and implications for emotional disturbance are discussed.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a type of attitude formation in which a stimulus is evaluated as positive or negative based on repeated pairings with valenced stimuli. Emerging evidence suggests that individuals differ in susceptibility to EC and these differences may be related to various social and psychological biases. One variable that has been linked with less negative attitude formation, although not using an EC paradigm, is mindfulness. Further, mindfulness is proposed to alter dimensions of elaboration that may underlie EC, particularly conditioning of negative attitudes. Therefore, three studies were conducted to examine whether mindfulness is linked to differential susceptibility to EC, particularly less conditioning of negative attitudes, and whether aspects of elaboration mediate this proposed relation. In all three studies, participants were exposed to an EC paradigm in which positive and negative pictures were paired with neutral Chinese ideographs. Then, they completed ideograph likability ratings. In Study 1, a measure of trait mindfulness was inversely associated with conditioning of negative attitudes, but not after accounting for negative state affect. In Study 2, there was no relation between either of two measures of trait mindfulness and susceptibility to EC. In Study 3, mindfulness was experimentally manipulated by randomly assigning participants to a mindful breathing induction or a mind-wandering control condition before they completed measures of elaboration and the EC paradigm. As compared to the control condition, the mindfulness condition showed greater susceptibility to conditioning of negative attitudes, after controlling for awareness of the picture-ideograph pairings. There was no support for the proposed mediation models through elaboration in either Studies 2 or 3. However, both studies provided evidence that more mindful individuals demonstrated less cognitive elaboration on negative stimuli. Further, both studies suggested that greater cognitive elaboration in response to pictures predicted less susceptibility to conditioning of positive attitudes and possibly greater susceptibility to conditioning of negative attitudes. Altogether, the three studies provided mixed and inconclusive evidence as to the relation between mindfulness and susceptibility to EC. However, the findings regarding cognitive elaboration may help to advance both the mindfulness and EC literatures.

The social and emotional lives of people are highly interdependent. Incipient evidence suggests that attention may also play an essential role in determining one’s social and emotional well-being. Mindfulness, as a manner of attending, entails greater moment-to-moment awareness to internal and external events, and is thought to have both intra- and inter-personal benefits. Here a study of mindfulness training (MT) examined whether training mindful attention would improve emotion regulation in social contexts as indexed by neural, behavioral, and experience sampling measures. More specifically, 60 participants in romantic relationships were randomly assigned to either four brief (20 min.) MT sessions or a structurally-equivalent control procedure. Romantic partners of these participants also completed questionnaires and experience sampling measures. Findings across the variety of measures supported hypotheses that MT would benefit social emotion regulation. Relative to control participants, those in MT demonstrated greater early attention to facial expressions on an Emotional Go/No-Go task, as indexed by the N200, a neural marker of conflict monitoring. Response time and accuracy during this task revealed more sustained efficient discrimination of facial expressions for MT participants. During day-to-day social interactions, MT participants reported more positive and less negative emotion as well as less negative emotion lability from one interaction to the next. A mediation analysis found improved accuracy on the Emotional Go/No-Go task mediated the relation between MT and more positive emotion during daily social interactions. Given that social emotion regulation places unique demands on attention for which mindfulness appears well-suited, research on both topics can build from these findings to better understand both intra- and inter-personal benefits of MT.

Vicarious traumatisation (VT) has been defined as an experience of change in several domains of personhood including worldview, identity, and beliefs related to major psychological needs. Self-care practice is widely considered essential in sustaining personal and professional well-being, and a lack of appropriate practice can enhance the risk of VT in trainee and newly qualified therapeutic practitioners. Both quantitative and qualitative research suggests that mindfulness practice can have a protective role in the risk of VT for trainees. This study examined the relationship between VT, self-care and mindfulness in a sample of 238 trainee therapists from the UK, Australia, Canada and Ireland. Structural equation modelling was used to test a mediation model with good fit with self-care as predictor variable, mindfulness as mediator, and VT as outcome variable. The hypothesis that when controlling for the effects of mindfulness on VT the effect of self-care on VT is no longer significant could not be confirmed as no mediational effect was present. The hypothesis that predicted a negative association between self-care practice and VT was confirmed with a significant total effect although the direct effect of self-care on VT was not significant. Findings are discussed in relation to previous research involving mindfulness in trainee cohorts. Links are made with neuroscience research to consider underlying mechanisms of mindfulness within the context of VT.

It is estimated that there are 12.5 million people in England living with neurological disorders (Neurological Alliance, 2014). People with neurological disorders as a result of acquired brain injury (ABI) are living with short and long-term disabilities. These include cognitive impairment, and physical and emotional distress. One of the most common complaints by individuals who have ABI is attention impairment. Attention difficulties can have serious ramifications for daily functioning. Although studies have explored the effects of evidence-based interventions such as mindfulness-based therapy on attention abilities, and have found that it improves individuals' attention skills (Moore et al, 2012), thus far research has been conducted mainly with non-clinical populations. This study set out to investigate whether a mindfulness-based intervention could prove beneficial for people with neurological disorders, particularly whether it could positively impact on attention impairment. The study employed a one group pre-test post-test design. The intervention was adapted from the MBSR programme developed by Kabat-Zinn. Twenty-two participants with ABI were recruited. The Conners Continuous Performance Test 3rd Edition (CPT-3), Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS), Attention Process Training-II Attention Questionnaire (APT-II AQ) and Clinical Outcome in Routine Evaluation-Outcome Measure (CORE-OM) were utilised to measure outcomes. The results revealed that there was a clinical improvement in self reported measures of mindfulness (MAAS) (Cohen d=0.28), attention (APT-II AQ) (Cohen d=0.33), and psychological distress (CORE-OM) (Cohen d=0.72). This was not observed using the neuropsychological test of attention (CPT-3) for overall group scores, but further evaluation showed some individuals' scores improved. The study is promising as it indicates that mindfulness based treatment can be effective with attentional problems as well as in reducing psychological distress for individuals with ABI. This could be valuable in terms of providing treatment for this client group and adds to the expanding research base on mindfulness-based intervention with this population.

Aims: To confirm the correlation between the ability to focus attention on vaginal sensations during penile-vaginal intercourse and the consistency of vaginal orgasm (Brody & Weiss, 2010) in our sample. To create a psychological method which would help women to improve their ability to focus the attention on vaginal sensations during PVI. The core of the method consists of mindfulness-based techniques and the Kegel exercise. In the next step we empirically verify the effectivity of such training. Based on the previous findings (Brody & Weiss, 2010) we hypothesized that the improvement in ablity to focus attention on vaginal sensations would result in higher VO consistency, higher satisfaction with partner sexuality and in gaining the ability to reach VO in women who had never experienced it. Methods: The vast majority of the study is based on the methods of quantitative statistics. The sample of 96 women (experimental group N=44, control group N=52) daily filled out a questionnaire on sexual behaviour for thirty days before and another 30 days after the training. We received the complete data from 80 probands. The whole sample also provided the data concerning lifetime sexual experience. The experimental group took part in the training which consisted of four 35minut sessions in a week interval....

La fréquence et la sévérité des feux de forêt de grande ampleur ont augmenté dans les vingt dernières années, par la conjonction de trois tendances lourdes : le réchauffement climatique, l’extension des interfaces périurbaines et l’augmentation de la biomasse. Par conséquent, la fiabilisation des opérations de lutte, et en particulier des équipes de commandement, devient un enjeu important. Mais les opérations de secours constituent surtout une fenêtre particulièrement intéressante sur le fait organisationnel en général et les processus de construction de sens en particulier. En effet, les pompiers sont confrontés à des exigences organisationnelles en conflit : stabiliser le sens des situations pour assurer l’efficacité de l’action collective (processus de contrôle), et le réévaluer en permanence pour détecter et s’adapter aux évolutions inattendues (processus d’écoute). Le contrôle cherche à fiabiliser les apprentissages, capitalise les succès, ignore le bruit, simplifie, privilégie l’anticipation, et oriente l’attention sur les objectifs de l’action et sur la structure. L’écoute cherche à accroitre la validité des apprentissages, valorise l’improvisation, invente, détecte les signaux faibles, complexifie, rebondit, et oriente l’attention sur les conséquences de l’action et sur les relations interpersonnelles.L’hypothèse centrale de cette recherche est que la gestion de ces exigences contradictoires est une source majeure de haute fiabilité. Son design se base sur la comparaison de deux territoires (l’Ouest américain et le sud de la France), et combine plusieurs méthodes : l’observation directe des opérations de secours, l’observation des sessions d’entrainement, et des formations, ainsi qu’une expérimentation sur la plateforme de simulation de la Sécurité Civile française / The frequency and impact of large wildland fires have been increasing for the past 20 years, due to the conjunction of three long term trends: global warming, growing wildland-urban interface and increase in biomass. As a result, enhancing organizational reliability in Incident Management Teams is becoming increasingly important. Examining how firefighters face large disasters is also relevant for organization studies because these situations offer a perspective on organizing and sensemaking. Indeed, firefighters are under conflicting organizational requirements: stabilizing the sense of situations for effective collective action (control processes) and reassessing situations to detect and adapt to unexpected changes (mindful processes). Control focuses on lessons learned, capitalizes on success, ignores noise, simplifies, values anticipation and direct attention on plans and strategies. Mindfulness focuses on improvising, detects weak signals, is reluctant to simplify, values resilience and interpersonal relationships.The central hypothesis of this research is that the successful management of these opposite requirements is an important source of operational reliability. The research is based on a comparison between two territories (the American West and Southern France) and combines several methods: direct observation of firefighting operations, direct observation of Incident Management Teams trainings, the analysis of available archival data, as well as controlled experiments on a France’s Civil Protection simulation training platform

<p>Background: Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is a genetic hematological disorder that affects more than 7 million people globally (NHLBI, 2009). It is estimated that 50% of adults with SCD experience pain on most days, with 1/3 experiencing chronic pain daily (Smith et al., 2008). Persons with SCD also experience higher levels of pain catastrophizing (feelings of helplessness, pain rumination and magnification) than other chronic pain conditions, which is associated with increases in pain intensity, pain behavior, analgesic consumption, frequency and duration of hospital visits, and with reduced daily activities (Sullivan, Bishop, & Pivik, 1995; Keefe et al., 2000; Gil et al., 1992 & 1993). Therefore effective interventions are needed that can successfully be used manage pain and pain-related outcomes (e.g., pain catastrophizing) in persons with SCD. A review of the literature demonstrated limited information regarding the feasibility and efficacy of non-pharmacological approaches for pain in persons with SCD, finding an average effect size of .33 on pain reduction across measurable non-pharmacological studies. Second, a prospective study on persons with SCD that received care for a vaso-occlusive crisis (VOC; N = 95) found: (1) high levels of patient reported depression (29%) and anxiety (34%), and (2) that unemployment was significantly associated with increased frequency of acute care encounters and hospital admissions per person. Research suggests that one promising category of non-pharmacological interventions for managing both physical and affective components of pain are Mindfulness-based Interventions (MBIs; Thompson et al., 2010; Cox et al., 2013). The primary goal of this dissertation was thus to develop and test the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of a telephonic MBI for pain catastrophizing in persons with SCD and chronic pain. </p><p>Methods: First, a telephonic MBI was developed through an informal process that involved iterative feedback from patients, clinical experts in SCD and pain management, social workers, psychologists, and mindfulness clinicians. Through this process, relevant topics and skills were selected to adapt in each MBI session. Second, a pilot randomized controlled trial was conducted to test the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of the telephonic MBI for pain catastrophizing in persons with SCD and chronic pain. Acceptability and feasibility were determined by assessment of recruitment, attrition, dropout, and refusal rates (including refusal reasons), along with semi-structured interviews with nine randomly selected patients at the end of study. Participants completed assessments at baseline, Week 1, 3, and 6 to assess efficacy of the intervention on decreasing pain catastrophizing and other pain-related outcomes. </p><p>Results: A telephonic MBI is feasible and acceptable for persons with SCD and chronic pain. Seventy-eight patients with SCD and chronic pain were approached, and 76% (N = 60) were enrolled and randomized. The MBI attendance rate, approximately 57% of participants completing at least four mindfulness sessions, was deemed acceptable, and participants that received the telephonic MBI described it as acceptable, easy to access, and consume in post-intervention interviews. The amount of missing data was undesirable (MBI condition, 40%; control condition, 25%), but fell within the range of expected missing outcome data for a RCT with multiple follow-up assessments. Efficacy of the MBI on pain catastrophizing could not be determined due to small sample size and degree of missing data, but trajectory analyses conducted for the MBI condition only trended in the right direction and pain catastrophizing approached statistically significance. </p><p>Conclusion: Overall results showed that at telephonic group-based MBI is acceptable and feasible for persons with SCD and chronic pain. Though the study was not able to determine treatment efficacy nor powered to detect a statistically significant difference between conditions, participants (1) described the intervention as acceptable, and (2) the observed effect sizes for the MBI condition demonstrated large effects of the MBI on pain catastrophizing, mental health, and physical health. Replication of this MBI study with a larger sample size, active control group, and additional assessments at the end of each week (e.g., Week 1 through Week 6) is needed to determine treatment efficacy. Many lessons were learned that will guide the development of future studies including which MBI strategies were most helpful, methods to encourage continued participation, and how to improve data capture.</p> / Dissertation

El objetivo del presente estudio fue examinar el efecto de un programa de intervención con componente mindfulness para la reducción de la ansiedad precompetitiva, el cual fue adaptado de programas que han demostrado su eficacia. La intervención estuvo compuesta por 12 sesiones de 1 hora de duración. Participaron en el estudio 33 deportistas de artes marciales (M = 18.97 años, DE = 1.64; 69.7% hombres). La ansiedad precompetitiva fue evaluada con la versión revisada del Inventario de Ansiedad Estado Competitiva -2 (CSAI-2R; Cox, Martens y Rusell, 2003), antes y después del periodo de la intervención. De acuerdo al grado de participación en la intervención, la muestra fue dividida en 2 grupos: Grupo Control (GC, n = 16) y Grupo Experimental (GE, n = 17). Los resultados evidenciaron diferencias significativas con tamaños del efecto grandes en la medida post test del GE, revelando una disminución en los niveles de ansiedad somática y cognitiva, y un aumento en los niveles de autoconfianza. Mientras, en el GC, no se obtuvo diferencias significativas y los tamaños del efecto fueron irrelevantes / The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of an intervention program with mindfulness component for the reduction of precompetitive anxiety, which was adapted from programs that have demonstrated their effectiveness. The intervention consisted of 12 sessions of 1 hour duration. Thirty-three martial arts athletes participated in the study (M = 18.97 years, SD = 1.64, 69.7% men and 30.3% women). Precompetitive anxiety was evaluated with the revised version of the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory -2 (CSAI-2R, Cox, Martens and Russell, 2003), before and after the intervention period. According to the degree of participation in the intervention, the sample was divided into 2 groups: Experimental Group (EG, n = 16) and Control Group (CG, n = 17). The results showed statistically significant differences in the EG post-test measure, revealing a decrease in the levels of somatic and cognitive anxiety, and an increase in levels of self-confidence. Meanwhile, in the CG, no significant differences were obtained and the effect sizes were irrelevant. / Revisón por pares