The elements of mindfulness, namely awareness and nonjudgmental acceptance of one's moment-to-moment experience, are regarded as potentially effective antidotes against common forms of psychological distress-rumination, anxiety, worry, fear, anger, and so on-many of which involve the maladaptive tendencies to avoid, suppress, or over-engage with one's distressing thoughts and emotions ( Hayes & Feldman, 2004 Kabat-Zinn, 1990). Mindfulness has been theoretically and empirically associated with psychological well-being. Mindfulness is like that-it is the miracle which can call back in a flash our dispersed mind and restore it to wholeness so that we can live each minute of life. Consider, for example: a magician who cuts his body into many parts and places each part in a different region-hands in the south, arms in the east, legs in the north, and then by some miraculous power lets forth a cry which reassembles whole every part of his body. Mindfulness is the miracle by which we master and restore ourselves. The review ends with a discussion on mechanisms of change of mindfulness interventions and suggested directions for future research. We conclude that mindfulness brings about various positive psychological effects, including increased subjective well-being, reduced psychological symptoms and emotional reactivity, and improved behavioral regulation. We begin with a discussion of the construct of mindfulness, differences between Buddhist and Western psychological conceptualizations of mindfulness, and how mindfulness has been integrated into Western medicine and psychology, before reviewing three areas of empirical research: cross-sectional, correlational research on the associations between mindfulness and various indicators of psychological health intervention research on the effects of mindfulness-oriented interventions on psychological health and laboratory-based, experimental research on the immediate effects of mindfulness inductions on emotional and behavioral functioning. This article reviews the empirical literature on the effects of mindfulness on psychological health. Within the past few decades, there has been a surge of interest in the investigation of mindfulness as a psychological construct and as a form of clinical intervention.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |