Computer-supported mindfulness: Evaluation of a mobile thought distancing application on naive meditators☆
Introduction
The last 2 decades have seen a constantly increasing interest in mindfulness techniques, due to the positive effects they bring in several domains, such as physical health, psychological well-being, social relationships, sports, work and performance (even including military training (Stanley et al., 2011)). Extensive reviews of the positive effects of mindfulness are provided in Brown et al. (2007), Chiesa and Serretti, (2011) and Keng et al. (2011).
Originally associated to specific meditation techniques (Kabat-Zinn, 1990), a more recent definition considers mindfulness as a psychological process that consists of two components: orientation to experience, which refers to an orientation of curiosity, openness and acceptance toward one's experience, and self-regulation of attention, which refers to the non-elaborative awareness of mental events, i.e. thoughts, feelings and sensations, as they arise (Bishop et al., 2004). Some authors refer to self-regulation of attention as (i) decentering, defined by Teasdale et al. (2002) as “a cognitive set in which negative thoughts and feelings are experienced as mental events, rather than as aspects of self or direct reflections of truth”, or (ii) detached mindfulness, defined as “a state of awareness of internal events, without responding to them with sustained evaluation, attempts to control or suppress them, or respond to them behaviorally” (Wells, 2006). Studies in the literature have shown that decentering can be an ameliorator of worry (Sugiura, 2004) and, in adjunct to other procedures, appears to be effective in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorders (Fisher and Wells, 2005, Fisher and Wells, 2008). Other studies have found that decentering can reduce ruminative thinking (Lykins and Baer, 2009, Raes and Williams, 2010, Ramel et al., 2004) and frequency of negative thoughts (Frewen et al., 2007). A typical way to achieve decentering is through techniques that require individuals not to react in response to their thoughts, but to be aware of them and observe them while they go away (thought distancing, for short). The study in this paper will focus specifically on mindfulness techniques that aim at achieving decentering through thought distancing.
Unfortunately, the practice of mindfulness techniques can be difficult for people with no or minimal experience with meditation (in the following, naive meditators) (Kabat-Zinn, 2005, Segal et al., 2002). This can discourage them to start practicing or lead them to abandon the practice soon. There is thus the need to explore new and simpler ways to bring the benefits of mindfulness to people. Recently, a number of mobile applications that aim at helping people in practicing mindfulness techniques have appeared, e.g. Mindfulapps (2012). Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the effectiveness of these applications has not been formally studied yet.
In our research, we developed a smartphone application aimed at helping users in practicing thought distancing. The goal of the present study is to assess whether our proposed application can be of help to naive meditators in achieving decentering. To this purpose, we contrasted practicing thought distancing with our application and with two traditional techniques, assessing the achieved level of decentering as well as participants' perception of pleasantness and difficulty.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides an introduction to the concept of mindfulness and surveys the major modern approaches to mindfulness. Then, it reviews related work on computer-supported mindfulness techniques. Section 3 illustrates the motivations and the design process that led us to the development of our mobile app, which is then described. Section 4 presents the experimental evaluation we carried out, whose results are reported in Section 5 and discussed in Section 6. Finally, Section 7 draws conclusions and outlines future work.
Section snippets
Related work
The origins of the first mindfulness techniques can historically be traced back to Eastern philosophies. In particular, they are central to Buddhist traditions which attribute the first teachings of mindfulness to the Buddha himself (Gunaratana, 2002).
Unlike Eastern traditions, Western conceptualizations of mindfulness are generally independent of any specific circumscribed philosophy, ethical code, or system of practices (Keng et al., 2011). In such conceptualizations, mindfulness was
The proposed application
In this section, we describe the motivations and the design process that led to the development of our mobile app, called AEON (smArtphone basEd thOught distaNcing). Then, we illustrate AEON in detail.
User study
The goal of our study was to evaluate the effectiveness of AEON in helping naive meditators to achieve mindfulness, comparing it with two traditional thought distancing techniques:
- (i)
cloud imagery (CLOUD, for short), i.e. a mental imagery task in which people imagine their thoughts as written on clouds floating in the sky, allowing them to occupy their own space and observe them as they pass by (Wells, 2006);
- (ii)
card-tossing (CARD, for short), i.e. a task in which people pick up cards (with their
Decentering
Fig. 6 shows the mean achieved level of decentering for the three conditions. The data was subjected to a Shapiro–Wilk test of normality, which revealed no significant deviation from the normal distribution. A one-way ANOVA was then carried out, which pointed out a significant effect (F(2, 42)=3.50, p<.05, η2=.14). The effect was then investigated by carrying out a t-test pairwise comparison with Bonferroni correction. The post-hoc analysis revealed a significant difference (p<.05) between CARD
Difficulty
AEON received the best ratings in terms of difficulty and the post-hoc analysis showed that AEON was perceived as significantly less difficult to practice than CLOUD. A possible explanation of this result is that, compared to CLOUD, AEON could provide a higher degree of computational off-loading. This term refers to “the extent to which different external representations reduce the amount of cognitive effort required to solve informationally equivalent problems” (Rogers, 2004) and is part of
Conclusions
After introducing the topic of computer-supported mindfulness, this paper assessed whether a smartphone app (AEON) that implements an interactive mindfulness practice could be effective in supporting naive meditators in achieving decentering. We compared AEON with two traditional, well-known mindfulness techniques. Results indicate that AEON can provide users with an effective, attractive and simple way to achieve decentering. Compared with the two traditional techniques, it was able to obtain
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Raul Pellarini who helped in the initial development of the iPhone app.
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This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Daniela Petrelli.