(PS4-91) Who Benefits from Mindfulness Training? Examining Personality Variables and Cognitive Performance

Despite the buzz surrounding mindfulness in the past decade, much is still unknown about who and how benefit most from the practice. One area of focus is how mindfulness training could assist with not just mood difficulties, but also cognitive disruption associated with emotional dysregulation. Negative emotions and emotional instability are correlated with impairment in memory, sustained attention, and cognitive control. Most research in this area has focused on long-term mindfulness training, but even brief training (one session or just a few minutes) can create positive changes that reduce or eliminate these deficiencies. Despite these promising findings, questions remain about whether cognitive or personality characteristics may increase the likelihood of benefit from these interventions, particularly regarding cognitive performance. This study examined the efficacy of brief mindfulness training to reduce interference from a negative mood induction task on several neuropsychological variables. Within a sample of healthy undergraduates, we compared a brief mindfulness exercise to both a distraction task and a neutral task to see whether cognitive performance differed on measures of neuropsychological functioning and sustained attention. In addition, we explored whether pre-existing self-reported emotional dysregulation, trait mindfulness, and psychological flexibility changed this relationship. Across tasks, those in the mindfulness condition typically performed as well or better than those in the other two conditions. When exploring personality variables, results showed that in the distraction condition, individuals with greater psychological flexibility performed better than those with lower psychological flexibility on a test of sustained attention. Overall, this study adds to existing literature on the widespread benefits of mindfulness training – enhancing emotion regulation and trait mindfulness as well as improving cognitive performance. The results suggest that individuals with higher psychological flexibility may employ distraction techniques more effectively than those with lower psychological flexibility, which resulted in lessened cognitive interference, though this finding would benefit from further investigation. This study significantly contributes to understanding how mindfulness interventions extend beyond mood enhancement. Moreover, it implies that pre-training personality traits may hold less sway in intervention selection, potentially benefiting a broad spectrum of individuals.