•Body scan meditation reduces the salience of perceived body boundaries and increases optimal emotional experience.•Happiness increases when the salience of body boundaries decreases.•Results suggest ...selflessness promotes happiness via dissolution of perceived body boundaries.
Drawing on the Self-centeredness/Selflessness Happiness Model (SSHM), we hypothesized that a reduction in the salience of perceived body boundaries would lead to increase optimal emotional experience. These constructs were assessed by means of self-report measures. Participants (n=53) were randomly assigned to either the selflessness (induced by a body scan meditation) condition or the control condition. As expected, the reduction in perceived body salience was greater in the body scan meditation condition than in the control condition. The change in perceived body salience was accompanied by a change in happiness and anxiety. Participants in the body-scan meditation condition reported greater happiness and less anxiety than participants in the control condition. Happiness increased when the salience of body boundaries decreased. Mediation analyses reveal that the change in happiness was mediated by the change in perceived body boundaries, which suggests that selflessness elicits happiness via dissolution of perceived body boundaries.
The theoretical model presented in this paper emerged from several different disciplines. This model proposes that the attainment of happiness is linked to the self, and more particularly to the ...structure of the self. We support the idea that the perception of a structured self, which takes the form of a permanent, independent and solid entity leads to self-centered psychological functioning, and this seems to be a significant source of both affliction and fluctuating happiness. Contrary to this, a selfless psychological functioning emerges when perception of the self is flexible (i.e., a dynamic network of transitory relations), and this seems to be a source of authentic-durable happiness. In this paper, these two aspects of psychological functioning and their underlying processes will be presented. We will also explore the potential mechanisms that shape them. We will conclude with an examination of possible applications of our theory.
We hypothesized that a shift from the body/self-consciousness matrix to a larger consciousness matrix, in which individuals perceive they belong to and are part of a larger life system, would lead to ...both a self-transcendence experience and positive transcendent emotions. In three studies, we experimentally exposed participants to macroscopic scenes of the earth from space and of various objects of the universe or to microscopic scenes about the inner workings of the human body. These conditions were compared to various control conditions depicting scenes of typical mesoscopic environments. All constructs were assessed using self-report measures. As predicted, a transient mental state marked by decreased self-salience, increased feelings of oneness, and transcendent emotions, such as awe, was consistently found to be significantly greater in the experimental conditions, in which the physical frame of reference (PFR) was changed, than in the control condition. Study 3 provides support for a sequential mediation model in which the changes in the scale of the PFR (i.e., vastness and smallness of the self) lead to a reduction in the body self (i.e., body loss) that mediates the effects of the experimental manipulation on self-transcendence. These results provide valuable directions for the study of self-transcendence.
Awe and time perception Droit-Volet, Sylvie; Dambrun, Michaël; Monier, Florie
Acta psychologica,
20/May , Letnik:
245
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The aim of this study was to systematically examine the effect of awe-inducing stimuli on the judgment of time. Three experiments were conducted using temporal bisection tasks in which participants ...viewed awe-inducing and no awe-inducing images presented for different durations and were asked to judge whether their duration was similar to a short or long anchor duration. Images of panoramic landscapes and images of the faces of well-known and admired people were used in experiments 1 and 2, respectively. In experiment 3, they did not judge the duration of the images, but that of a neutral stimulus occurring during the presentation of images. In each experiment, participants rated the awe-inducing and no-awe-inducing images according to their components: admiration, beauty, awe, emotional valence, arousal, symbolic self-size, and full-body self-size. Results consistently showed significant time distortions when participants viewed the different awe-inducing images compared to the no-awe images, although the effect was weaker for the images of faces than for those of landscapes. Time distortion took the form of temporal lengthening in Experiments 1 and 2 and shortening in Experiment 3. These different temporal distortions are consistent with attention effects due to awe-inducing stimuli which capture attention to the detriment of time processing.
•Images of sublime panoramic landscapes and of faces of famous and admired people induce awe.•Observing awe-inducing images distorts our perception of time.•Attention mechanisms underlie the distortion of time in front of awe-inducing image.
A person's tendency to approach pleasant stimuli and to avoid unpleasant stimuli reflects a basic psychological phenomenon. The present research aimed to investigate the extent to which mindfulness ...practices and trait equanimity can attenuate this motivational process. In two studies, participants were asked to perform an Approach/Avoidance Task (AAT). In Study 1 (N = 84), prior to completing the AAT, participants were randomly assigned to one of two guided mindfulness-based meditation conditions (breathing or body-scan) or to an active control condition. In Study 2 (N = 71), which controlled for mindfulness practice, motor responses to the AAT were compared by level of equanimity of the participants (low vs. high). The results revealed that breathing meditation practice and trait equanimity significantly moderated participants' motor responses to the AAT, and that the body-scan meditation did not moderate these responses. Bayesian analyses showed that participants in the breathing meditation group (Study 1) and those with higher equanimity (Study 2) showed a reduction of bias in their motor responses to the AAT. These results suggest that meditation practice and trait equanimity may promote a decrease in automatic motivational approach and avoidance tendencies evoked by positive and negative stimuli.
This manuscript presents two studies on the effect of mindfulness meditation on duration judgment and its relationship to the subjective experience of time when the interval durations are on the ...second or the minute time scale. After the first 15 minutes of a 30-min meditation or control exercise, meditation-trained participants judged interval durations of 15 to 50 s or 2 to 6 min, during which they performed either a mindfulness meditation exercise or a control exercise. The participants' scores on the self-reported scales indicated the effectiveness of the meditation exercise, as it increased the level of present-moment awareness and happiness and decreased that of anxiety. The results showed an underestimation of time for the short interval durations and an overestimation of time for the long intervals, although the participants always reported that time passed faster with meditation than with the control exercise. Further statistical analyses revealed that the focus on the present-moment significantly mediated the exercise effect on the time estimates for long durations. The inversion in time estimates between the two time scales is explained in terms of the different mechanisms underlying the judgment of short and long durations, i.e., the cognitive mechanisms of attention and memory, respectively.
Objectives
Buddhist and scientific theories have described equanimity as a general outcome of mindfulness practices. Equanimity is a calm and balanced state of mind regardless of the valence of ...situations or objects and is a decoupling between the evaluation of this valence and the resulting common automatic approach or avoidance reactions. The relation between the practice of mindfulness and equanimity still remain to be empirically explored.
Methods
We conducted a correlational study (
N
= 106) to investigate the relation between hours of mindfulness practice among former mindfulness-based stress reduction program participants and two components of equanimity: even-minded state of mind and hedonic independence, using the EQUA-S. A second study (
N
= 86) investigated experimentally the effect of two meditation practices on equanimity among novice participants.
Results
The results of the first study revealed positive correlations between the components of equanimity and both formal and informal mindfulness practices. Results from the second study revealed that the increase in even-minded state of mind during the experimental session was significantly greater in the mindfulness practice condition than in the active control condition. Hedonic independence was not significantly affected by the short mindfulness practice.
Conclusions
These results confirmed the importance of empirically studying equanimity at both trait and state levels, and identifying its relation and specificities with meditation and related phenomena.
Describing the dynamical nature of happiness is crucial for understanding why individuals are constantly running on a hedonic treadmill around set levels of well-being. Based on the self-centeredness ...branch of the ’self-centeredness/selflessness happiness model’, we present a dynamical model that focuses on unfolding the hedonic dimension of happiness dynamics through the use of the approach–avoidance framework. This numerical model enables us to understand and analyze emerging hedonic cycles caused by hedonic motivation and hedonic adaptation. In particular, hedonic motivation leads people to experience hedonic activities, which result in successes or failures and experiences of pleasure and afflictive affects; whereas hedonic adaptation causes individuals to return to a baseline level of pleasure and afflictive affects, more quickly for the former than the latter. The proposed dynamical model is based on the approach–avoidance framework that considers human behavior in two separate regulatory processes that contribute to homeostasis of individuals’ happiness. We analyze these two processes independently and conjointly in order to highlight their effect on happiness levels. The analysis shows how individual characteristics and their combination may result in hedonic cycles, afflictive affects, (dis-)pleasure, and particular happiness dynamics. We also discuss how such a numerical model enables us to perform a multifactorial analysis which is hardly feasible outside the context of a simulation and how it may help us to narrow and design relevant experimental surveys from these preliminary numerical results.
The study of farmers’ mental health according to their production model (organic vs. conventional) suggests that organic farming was associated with better mental health than conventional farming. ...However, to our knowledge, no research has been conducted to examine the social psychological factors responsible for these differences. This research aims to investigate the role of job content and values on farmers’ mental health according to their production model. To this end, an online questionnaire study on these dimensions was conducted on a sample of farmers. The results revealed that organic farmers scored significantly lower in anxiety and higher in positive emotions than conventional farmers. Psychological demand and conformity value appeared to be the most important explanatory factors related to the effect of farmers’ production model on mental health. Implications for the response rate and farmers’ mental health were discussed.
This study examined the prospective judgment of interval durations during a mindfulness meditation exercise in comparison with two control exercises involving different degrees of attentional demands ...and participants who either had or had not been trained to practice mindfulness exercises. The results showed that the interval durations (going from 15 to 60 s) were systematically judged shorter with the different mindfulness exercises (breathing, body scan) than with the control exercises. This underestimation of time was accompanied by the awareness that time seems to pass faster and by a decrease in the level of anxiety. However, the subjective feeling of the passage of time and the anxiety level did not explain time perception during a mindfulness meditation exercise. Further results suggest the critical role of attention in the effects of meditation on time judgments, a finding that is consistent with the idea that time flies during meditation as if time no longer existed.
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