Calmness in mindful practice: emotional stroop performance following stress induction in a mindfulness camp

Abstract

The current study aims to explore the underlying mechanisms of mindfulness in understanding how it can bring about beneficial effects in clinical applications. We adopted a prospective design to examine the impact of a 3-day intensive mindfulness training camp on responses to different categories of words on the Emotional Stroop task (Watts, McKenna, Sharrock, & Trezise, 1986) and compared the performance of this group of participants with that of a control group. Five Facets of Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ; Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer, & Toney, 2006) and Trait Meta Mood Scale (TMMS; Salovey, Mayer, Goldman, Turvey, & Palfai, 1995) were also adopted to tap mindfulness and emotional intelligence respectively. Significant effect was found that mindfulness can improve the ability to describe experience, act with awareness, and repair negative mood. For the Emotional Stroop task, although there was no Stroop effect or significant group effect, post hoc analysis found intriguing results that the meditators respond slower for the emotionally neutral word while the changes for the emotional word was similar to the control group. The results provided preliminary supports for the notion that mindfulness training enhanced acuity in analyzing the environment, thus alerting the individual of previously unnoticed stimuli.