Emotion
Does mindfulness start an upward spiral of good mood and thoughts?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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
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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
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