Research on Mindfulness--a Partial Overview

By George Shears

There is now a rapidly growing body of research that documents the marked effectiveness of mindfulness in many areas of psychology, neuroscience, and medicine. It has been shown especially to be a valuable means of stress reduction, as well as an exceptionally powerful method for coping with chronic pain and other forms of mind/body adversity.

Here’s a small sampling of this research that shows the diversity of problems and conditions for which mindfulness has been found beneficial: This research includes recent clear-cut documentation by Dr. Richard Davidson, Director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Using cutting-edge brain imaging methods, he has found that a group of people who went through the standard 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program showed “a significant increase in activity in the part of the brain responsible for positive emotions and traits like optimism and resilience—the left prefrontal cortex.”

You can learn more about his extensive research in this area by watching this video of a presentation he gave at The Wisconsin Academy.

A further video summary of some of this research is available here.

Another outstanding example of research in this area has been conducted by Dr. Phillipe Goldin, who is a post-doctoral researcher in Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. He recently did a presentation at Google University on the “Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation.” You can watch it by clicking here.

Dr. Daniel Goleman, by publishing his 1997 best seller, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, underscored the crucial importance of many facets of mindfulness, although he did not explicitly use this umbrella term in referring to them.

Western psychologists, especially those who favor a cognitive-behavioral therapy approach with their clients, are increasingly applying mindfulness in their treatment programs.

One of the most well known and successful examples of this is the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, & Distress Tolerance, published in 2007.)

Another outstanding example of this is the recently-published book, Acceptance- and Mindfulness-Based Approaches to Anxiety by Susan Orsillo and Lizabeth Roemer.Several studies have documented the effectiveness of mindfulness in coping with chronic pain.

You can read a summary of one of them here.

Another research study has been reported very recently, showing that the practice of mindfulness meditation slows the progression of HIV.

It has also been shown to be helpful for people with fibromyalgia. (Although I did not do any formal research on this condition in the MBSR course I taught, there were a number of participants with fibromyalgia who reported that the mindfulness training helped them to cope with it more effectively.)

Here’s a report of a pilot study on adolescents with learning disabilities showing that mindfulness seems to lessen their anxiety, promote social skills, and also improve their academic performance.