Journal
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 8, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
FRONTIERS MEDIA SA
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00551
Keywords
mindfulness; meditation; gender; emotion; affect
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health [MH067553-05, K23-AT006328-01A1]
- National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) [UH2AT009145]
- Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR)
- Mind and Life Institute
- Lenz Foundation
- Hershey Foundation
- Brown University Contemplative Studies Initiative
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Objectives: While recent literature has shown that mindfulness training has positive effects on treating anxiety and depression, there has been virtually no research investigating whether effects differ across genders-despite the fact that men and women differ in clinically significant ways. The current study investigated whether college-based meditation training had different effects on negative affect for men and women. Methods: Seventy-seven university students (36 women, age = 20.7 +/- 3.0 years) participated in 12-week courses with meditation training components. They completed self-report questionnaires of affect, mindfulness, and self-compassion before and after the course. Results: Compared to men, women showed greater decreases in negative affect and greater increases on scales measuring mindfulness and self-compassion. Women's improvements in negative affect were correlated to improvements in measures of both mindfulness skills and self-compassion. In contrast, men showed non-significant increases in negative affect, and changes in affect were only correlated with ability to describe emotions, not any measures of experiential or self-acceptance. Conclusion: These findings suggest that women may have more favorable responses than men to school-based mindfulness training, and that the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions may be maximized by gender-specific modifications.
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