Do women and men get different benefits from meditation training?
After a semester of meditation classes, women's negative mood dropped while men's did not, even though both improved in mindfulness and self-compassion.
Source
Women Benefit More Than Men in Response to College-based Meditation Training
Study at a glance
- Design
- Other — Uncontrolled pre-post study of students in 12-week meditation courses, comparing change in women versus men with time x gender ANOVAs.
- N
- N=77 · 77 analysed (36 women, the rest men) of 114 who started; 37 excluded for low participation, incomplete questionnaires or loss to follow-up.
- Population
- Brown University undergraduates who chose courses with meditation labs, 2008-2011
- Outcome
- Change in positive and negative affect (PANAS), mindfulness facets (FFMQ) and self-compassion (SCS)
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Undergraduates in 12-week courses that included three one-hour meditation labs per week, focused mainly on attention to the breath and body, filled in mood, mindfulness and self-compassion questionnaires at the start and end of the semester. The researchers analysed 77 students who completed both surveys and attended at least half the labs, and tested whether change over time differed by gender. They also correlated changes in negative mood with changes in mindfulness and self-compassion separately for women and men.
What they found
The group as a whole showed no change in positive or negative mood, but there was a time by gender interaction: women's negative affect fell significantly while men's rose slightly and non-significantly. Both genders improved in overall mindfulness and self-compassion, with women improving more on four of five mindfulness facets. In women, lower negative mood went with gains in non-reactivity, awareness and reduced self-judgment; in men, it correlated only with the describing facet. Men actually reported slightly more practice time, so dose did not explain the gap.
The limits
What it doesn't show
There was no control group, so improvements cannot be attributed to meditation rather than the passage of the semester, the course content or expectation effects. Students chose these courses themselves, attended a single private university, and 32% of starters were dropped, which could bias who remained. All measures were self-report, men may under-report distress, gender was recorded only as a binary, and the proposed rumination-versus-distraction explanation was not directly measured.
Key terms
- Mindfulness meditation
- Practice of deliberately paying non-judgmental attention to present-moment experience, often starting with the breath.
- Negative affect
- The degree to which someone currently feels unpleasant emotions such as distress, shame or irritability, here measured with the PANAS.
- Time x gender interaction
- A statistical test of whether the amount of change from before to after training differs between women and men.
- Internalising vs externalising coping
- Turning distress inward through rumination or self-criticism versus directing it outward through distraction or activity.
- Self-compassion
- Treating oneself with kindness and a sense of shared humanity when things go wrong, rather than harsh self-judgment.
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Quiz yourself
What was the main gender-related finding for negative affect?
Common questions
Does this prove meditation works better for women?
Not on its own. Without a control group or random assignment, the gender difference in change could reflect other semester events or who chose to stay in the study.
Did women improve more because they started out more distressed?
No. Contrary to prediction, women and men did not differ in positive or negative affect at baseline.
Why might men not benefit in mood?
The authors speculate that paying more attention to previously ignored feelings may temporarily raise distress for people who usually cope by distraction, but this was not tested.
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