Does being mindful and calm boost your brainpower?
People with high mindfulness and low anxiety perform better on visual memory and attention tests than those with low mindfulness and high anxiety.
Source
Better Cognitive Performance Is Associated With the Combination of High Trait Mindfulness and Low Trait Anxiety
Study at a glance
- Design
- Case-control — Extreme groups from MAAS × STAI-T screening: high-mindfulness/low-anxiety vs low-mindfulness/high-anxiety on attention, RT, and VWM
- N
- N=60 · 392 screened; 30 per extreme group (15 women each), ages ~18–30
- Population
- Taiwanese university-age adults selected for high mindfulness/low anxiety or the reverse
- Outcome
- Attention, reaction time, and visual working-memory capacity in high-mindfulness/low-anxiety vs low-mindfulness/high-anxiety groups
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Inspect source passages
Does being mindful and calm boost your brainpower?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
392 prospective participants filled out the initial questionnaires
A total of 392 people (215 females) responded to the advertisements and completed both questionnaires mentioned above.
18 years old as the minimum age limit for participants
There was also an age limit with a range from 18 to 30 years old.
What they did
Researchers screened a pool of 392 young adults aged 18 to 30 using questionnaires to measure their baseline levels of mindfulness and anxiety. From this pool, they selected 60 final participants to form extreme groups of 30: a high-mindfulness, low-anxiety group, and a low-mindfulness, high-anxiety group. All participants performed three cognitive tasks evaluating attention, reaction times, and visual memory capacity.
What they found
The group with high mindfulness and low anxiety showed significantly better accuracy on the color-based conflict task and demonstrated superior storage capacity on the visual memory test compared to the highly anxious, less mindful group. However, the groups did not differ in their physical reaction times on any of the attention or conflict tasks.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because this study is correlational, it cannot prove that high mindfulness or low anxiety directly cause better cognitive performance. Additionally, the researchers only compared extreme groups, meaning they did not look at people who have both high mindfulness and high anxiety, or both low mindfulness and low anxiety. The sample was also restricted to young adults, so these findings may not apply to older populations.
Key terms
- Trait Mindfulness
- A naturally occurring, stable personality characteristic describing an individual's general tendency to pay attention to the present moment without judgment.
- Trait Anxiety
- A stable personality characteristic reflecting an individual's general tendency to perceive situations as threatening and respond with worry or tension.
- Executive Functions
- A set of higher-level cognitive processes, such as planning, working memory, and attention control, necessary for managing behavior.
- Working Memory Capacity
- The limited amount of information an individual can actively hold and manipulate in mind over a short period.
- Cognitive Inhibition
- The mental ability to suppress irrelevant or distracting information while focusing on a target task.
Flashcards
0 of 35 answers reviewed
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
What did the abbreviations HMLA and LMHA represent in the context of this study?
Common questions
Did the participants practice meditation before this study?
No, the researchers specifically recruited individuals who had no prior experience with any style of meditation, yoga, or tai chi to isolate natural personality differences.
Were there any differences in cognitive performance between men and women?
In general, men and women performed similarly, though male participants in the high-mindfulness, low-anxiety group showed higher sensitivity in the visual memory task than males in the low-mindfulness, high-anxiety group.
Which tasks were used to measure the participants' cognitive abilities?
The researchers used three distinct tasks: the Attentional Network Test, a Color Stroop Task, and a visual change detection task.
More on Mindfulness