Does mindfulness start an upward spiral of good mood and thoughts?
After mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, people recovering from depression had more pleasant thoughts in daily life, and a good mood on one day predicted more pleasant thoughts the next day, though pleasant thoughts did not in turn predict later mood.
Source
Mindfulness training promotes upward spirals of positive affect and cognition: multilevel and autoregressive latent trajectory modeling analyses
Study at a glance
- Design
- RCT — Randomised MBCT vs waitlist trial (secondary analysis); experience sampling 10 times a day for 6 days before and after treatment, analysed with multilevel regression and autoregressive latent trajectory (cross-lagged) models
- N
- N=130 · 130 adults randomised (64 MBCT, 66 waitlist); 121-129 had complete data on any given measure
- Population
- Dutch adults with a history of major depression and residual depressive symptoms, not currently in a depressive episode; mostly women in their forties
- Outcome
- Momentary positive affect and positive cognition (rated pleasantness of current thought), and day-to-day autoregressive and cross-lagged links between them
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Adults with residual depressive symptoms were randomly assigned to 8 weekly sessions of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) or a waitlist. Before and after, they carried a beeping watch for 6 days; at 10 random moments a day they rated positive mood words and wrote down their current thought and how pleasant it was. The authors tested whether MBCT increased momentary positive thoughts, and used cross-lagged models to see whether each day's positive mood or positive thought predicted the next day's, as the upward-spiral theory proposes.
What they found
MBCT increased the rated pleasantness of momentary thoughts relative to the waitlist (b = 0.23), with the MBCT group rising from 3.96 to 4.21 on a 7-point scale while controls stayed flat. Across participants, positive mood on one day predicted positive mood the next day, and positive mood also predicted next-day positive thoughts, but positive thoughts did not predict later mood or later thoughts. The mood-to-next-day-thought link was significant in the MBCT group (b = 0.17) but not in the waitlist group, suggesting mindfulness tightened the coupling of mood and thought.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The waitlist control cannot rule out non-specific effects of attending a supportive group therapy, and there was no masking of condition. Only half of a full upward spiral was found, because thoughts never fed back into later mood, and the group difference in cross-lagged paths rests on one path being significant in one group but not the other. 'Positive cognition' was a single rating of how pleasant a thought was, the attentional mechanisms in the theory were not measured, and the sample of people with past depression may not generalise to others.
Key terms
- Broaden-and-build theory
- The proposal that positive emotions widen the range of thoughts and actions people consider, which over time builds lasting psychological resources.
- Upward spiral
- A self-reinforcing loop in which positive emotions promote positive thinking, which in turn promotes more positive emotion.
- Experience sampling method (ESM)
- Collecting repeated in-the-moment reports from people in daily life, usually prompted by random signals, which reduces memory bias.
- Cross-lagged effect
- The extent to which one variable at an earlier time predicts a different variable at a later time, controlling for each variable's own earlier level.
- Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT)
- An 8-week group programme combining mindfulness meditation with cognitive therapy ideas, designed to prevent relapse in recurrent depression.
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Quiz yourself
What was the main effect of MBCT on momentary thoughts?
Common questions
What does it mean that positive affect was the 'prime mover'?
Day-to-day, good mood predicted next-day good mood and next-day pleasant thoughts, but pleasant thoughts did not predict later mood. So in these data the causal-looking arrows ran from emotion to thought, not the other way.
Why use experience sampling rather than end-of-week questionnaires?
Asking people about their mood right when a beep sounds, in their normal lives, captures moment-to-moment fluctuations and avoids the distortions of remembering how one felt days ago.
Does this show mindfulness itself caused the changes?
It shows MBCT did better than waiting. Because the control group received nothing, benefits of group support, expectations or attention from therapists could also contribute.
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