Mindfulness
Does being mindful and calm boost your brainpower?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People with high mindfulness and low anxiety perform better on visual memory and attention tests than those with low mindfulness and high anxiety.
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
A combination of low trait anxiety and high trait mindfulness is associated with superior visual memory storage capacity and higher accuracy on attention tasks compared to high trait anxiety combined with low mindfulness.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
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