Solution
Swati answered on
Aug 13 2021
Impact of Mindfulness Meditation
On
Human behavior in terms of Selective attention
Abstract
Over the past few years, Mindfulness meditation has grown popularly showing its impact on the attention. Although, the research ca
ied out are long terms that impact the ability to sustain attention as well as enhances cognitive functioning. Human behavior is difficult to predict and understand as it is influenced by several factors giving rise to different findings and theories for one stimulus. Each individual may react and respond differently in the same situation. In this study, impact of mindfulness is studied specially by using intervention like meditation on the human behavior in terms of attention. Interventions associated with mindfulness was ca
ied out in two ways, one group did the ted talk meditation whereas other watched two different videos in order to study the impact on selective attention by assessing the response time. By setting up a control group against the mini intervention, impact on mindfulness is studied using the Stroop interference. IBM SPSS Statistics Package was used to ca
y out data analyses along with measuring the Stroop Interference score for each of 142 participants as well as Stroop Interference average for both the interventions. Less impairment by incongruent color-word pairings was resulted for Mindfulness meditation condition participants as compared to control condition participants. Analysis of the MAAS survey further showed that there was no difference in trait mindfulness skills for participants in the Mindfulness Meditation Condition as compared to the participants in the Control Condition. Findings suggest that the ability to sustain selective attention of an individual is enhanced by the mindfulness meditation leading to showing impact on human behavior.
Introduction
Human behavior is influenced by several biological, perceptual, learning and cognitive processes. Improvements in cognitive performance as well as mood of people can be observed who has undergone extensive meditation training. (Cahn & Polich, 2006), (Davidson et al, 2003). Also attention as well as visuospatial processes can be enhanced by long term meditation practice. (Kozhevnikov etal, 2009) (Jha et al, 2007). There was found positive co
elation between self reported mindfulness and sustained attention comparison to controls in study on Buddhist meditation practitioners. (Moore & Malinowski, 2009). Mindfulness meditation is focused practice that works on body and
eath sensations to maintain state of mind in relax zone. Formal meditation practice may be associated with distractions but it is taught to meditator to acknowledge discursive thoughts and return back non-judgmentally his/her attention to
eathing. (Wallace, 2006).
This research area is important to be studied to understand the factors that influence human behavior along with impact on several theories associated with the same. This study aims to find the impact of mini interventions in mindfulness meditation to show its impact on attention of an individual which reflects the human behavior.
Biological process contributes to understand human behavior as all behavior is controlled by the central nervous system. Areas such as reaction time, emotion, attention span, vision and time perception helps to study human behavior. Primary method of research used in same context was introspection that involves training people to focus, concentrate and report on their experiences in reaction to stimuli. (Wundt). Participants were trained with the help of videos and the controlled environment for mindfulness meditation in the research to enhance the focus and concentration which was observed with the help of response time study in terms of attention. The suggestions from biological approach are that treatment of psychological problems can be done as disease which is often cured by drugs. Some negative factors like drug, traumatic injury may lead to serious destruction whereas a regular exercise, challenging mental activities and healthy diet can lead to positive long term impact on
ain as well as psychological development. (Kolb et al, 2003)
Cognitive psychologists focus on the functionalist insights that discuss how emotion, affect, events and environment interact with each other resulting in perceptions by humans. This may be called as scientific study of mind. These processes include following stages of memory-
1. Sensory memory storage that holds the sensory information.
2. Short term memory storage that tends to hold the information for short duration or temporary time to ca
y out the analysis and then retrieves the analyzed information for long term memory. This may also be called as working memory.
3. Long term memory that tends to hold the information for longer durations which is received from the short term memory. This may be called as storage memory.
(Engle et al, 1999)
Cognitive psychologist builds up cognitive model based on the processing of information that enters mind of people which include attention, memory, perception, thinking, consciousness and language. (McLeod, 2015). Influence of meditation is studied in research wherein environment was controlled and training provided created a memory to produce outcomes.
Learning contributes to understand human behavior as psychologists define learning as permanent behavioral change due to experience. Psychology of learning emphasizes on the way people learn and interact with the environment. All behaviors are resulted due to learning processes (Watson, 2003 ) Herein, the learning reinforced with the help of meditation training using videos, ve
al and written instructions as well as controlled environment. The human behavior was altered wherein the response time reduced indicating the increase in attention.. Behaviorism contributed to understand learning processes wherein there were three major types of behavioral learning that are classical conditioning, operant conditioning and observational learning. (Candamo et al, 2010) .As per classical conditioning, a neutral stimulus...