Meditation and Appropriation: Best Practices for Counselors Who Utilize Meditation

Support for meditation is found across academic communities and popular culture. Although the application of meditative practices has yielded positive treatment outcomes, larger purposes of the practice are perhaps lost in the empirically driven West, thus driving a risk of appropriation. In response, the authors outline 4 implications for best practice for counselors who aspire to engage in the culturally responsible use of meditative practices.     

Meditative interventions and antisocial personality disorder

Empathic functioning and inhibitory control deficits are two symptoms of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). Despite their deleterious effects, limited research exists on interventions that would ameliorate these specific symptoms. We suggest that meditative interventions may help to increase empathic functioning and inhibitory control in ASPD individuals. Using Luria’s working brain framework, we present research showing that meditative interventions influence the same brain regions associated with empathic functioning and inhibitory control. Implications for the counseling profession and directions for further research are discussed.     

The experience of meditation for people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and their caregivers – a qualitative analysis

There is a lack of studies about psychological interventions for people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and their caregivers. We investigated the experience of a meditation training program tailored for ALS needs. People with ALS (pALS) and their caregivers that joined a meditation program for ALS were interviewed at the end of the program. Verbatims were analyzed with a qualitative approach. Both pALS and their caregivers reported a positive impact on their psychological well-being, promoted by an increase in acceptance and non-judgmental attitude. Furthermore, coping strategies seem to improve, with a positive effect on resilience skills. The ALS meditation training program seems to be an effective psychological intervention for the promotion of well-being in pALS and their caregivers.     

Enhanced happiness and stress alleviation upon insight meditation retreat: mindfulness,a part of traditional Buddhist meditation

This research aims to examine how traditional insight meditation in Thailand is trained and to investigate the impact of this practice on happiness and perceived stress. The fuller meaning of mindfulness and how to interweave mindfulness in daily practice is discussed. The intervention was a seven-day traditional insight meditation retreat in Thailand. The final sample included 656 participants, n?=?330 and 326 in experimental group and control group, respectively. Validated versions of happiness and perceived stress scales for Thai people were used. The magnitude of happiness and stress changes following the intervention, determined by effect sizes were used as a benchmark for interpreting the health status change between baseline and post-test. The effect sizes for happiness and perceived stress were .379 and ?.428 in the meditation group, which is much greater, compared to the effect sizes of ?.045 and ?.003, respectively, in the control group.     

A wandering mind is a less caring mind: Daily experience sampling during compassion meditation training

Mind wandering, or the tendency for attention to drift to task-irrelevant thoughts, has been associated with worse intra- and inter-personal functioning. Utilizing daily experience sampling with 51 adults during 9-weeks of a compassion meditation program, we examined effects on mind wandering (to neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant topics) and caring behaviors for oneself and others. Results indicated that compassion meditation decreased mind wandering to neutral topics and increased caring behaviors towards oneself. When collapsing across topics, mind wandering did not serve as an intermediary between the frequency of compassion meditation practice and caring behaviors, though mind wandering to pleasant and unpleasant topics was linked to both variables. A path analysis revealed that greater frequency of compassion meditation practice was related to reductions in mind wandering to unpleasant topics and increases in mind wandering to pleasant topics, both of which were related to increases in caring behaviors for oneself and others.     

The impact of balance‐focused attitudes on job stress: Gender differences evidenced in American and Chinese samples

Based on gender role expectations model, we examined how balance‐focused attitudes would affect job stress by influencing individuals' perceptions of family interference with work (FIW), and investigated whether a gender difference would exist in the relationships among balance‐focused attitudes, FIW and job stress. Using two independent samples from the United States and China, we found support for the indirect influence of balance‐focused attitudes on job stress, through FIW. Participants with balance‐focused attitudes experienced lower levels of job stress as they perceived less interference from family to work. As expected, such indirect effect was more pronounce among male participants, meaning that the male participants benefited more from having balance‐focused attitudes. Discussion, theoretical and practical implications are provided.     

Rethinking value elicitation for personal consequential decisions

The application of multiattribute decision analysis to personal consequential decision problems can be unhelpful particularly where the analysis fails to help the decision maker to discover new values, or where the decision maker is unable to visualize the experience that may result from choosing a particular course of action. We concur with James March that values are best discovered by the act of choosing and experimenting but acknowledge that the act of choice can lead to irreversible consequences. Both of these problems suggest that techniques which assist the decision maker to envisage the consequences of choice need to be developed and incorporated into the modelling process. We suggest some forms that these techniques might take. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

惟我与无我：中西方自我观比较新解

该文从自我意识发展的轨迹来诠释中西方自我观的差异。认为从自我意识发展的动态过程来看。中西方自我处于不同的发展阶段：西方心理学将自我视为精神发展的核心,是“惟我”的;中国人文主义心理学则认为执着于自我将阻碍个体发展,心理发展的最高境界是对自我的超越．因而是“无我”的。自我研究方法的差异,表现为寻找自我实体的西方实证方法与可以深入自我背后本源的东方式禅定。     

Mindfulness induction and cognition: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Mindfulness meditation might improve a variety of cognitive processes, but the available evidence remains fragmented. This preregistered meta-analysis (PROSPERO-CRD42018100320) aimed to provide insight into this hypothesis by assessing the effects of brief mindful attention induction on cognition. Articles were retrieved from Pubmed, PsycInfo and Web of Science up until August 1, 2018. A total of 34 studies were included. The outcomes were categorized into four cognitive domains: attentional functioning, memory, executive functioning and higher-order function. A small effect was found across all cognitive domains (Hedges’ g = 0.18, 95% IC = 0.07–0.29). Separated analyses for each cognitive domain revealed an effect only in higher-order cognitive functions (k = 10, Hedges’ g = 0.35, 95% IC = 0.20–0.50). Results suggest that mindfulness induction improves cognitive performance in tasks involving complex higher-order functions. There was no evidence of publication bias, but studies generally presented many methodological flaws.