EFFECTS OF A TWO-WEEK MINDFULNESS INTERVENTION ON ASPECTS OF ATTENTION

Abstract: Mindfulness is a form of meditation commonly used as a treatment against symptoms likestress, anxiety and depression that often arises in relation to chronic illnesses like cancer. Research have yielded positive results for mindfulness as a treatment for these symptoms butalso for improvements in attention in healthy people following mindfulness-training. Thepresent study used a within-group design where participants acted as their own control, withmeasures taken before and after a two-week internet-based meditation-intervention withexercises 5 days a week. This was done to investigate if mindfulness-training had any effect onthree different subsystems of attention: alerting, orienting and conflict monitoring. Analysis ofthe results yielded a significant difference in conflict monitoring from pre- to posttest whichsuggests that participants became more resilient towards distractors following mindfulnesstraining. Future research should focus on including more participants and to control fordifferences between already existing groups, for example gender- or age-related differences.