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Upward Spirals of Mindfulness and Reappraisal: Testing the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory with Autoregressive Latent Trajectory Modeling

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Abstract

The mindful reappraisal hypothesis of the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory (Garland et al. in Psychol Inquiry 26(4):293–314, 2015a; Psychol Inquiry 26(4):377–387, 2015b) proposes that mindfulness generates eudaimonic well-being by promoting positive reappraisal, the positive psychological process through which stressful events are re-construed as benign, meaningful, or growth-promoting. To test this hypothesis, we examined prospective relations between state mindfulness and positive reappraisal in a community sample participating in a mindfulness-based intervention (MBI). At seven weekly time points throughout the MBI, participants (N = 234) engaged in a 10-min mindfulness meditation exercise at home and completed a measure of the degree of state mindfulness experienced during the meditation, as well as a measure of their use of positive reappraisal over the previous week. Support for the mindful reappraisal hypothesis of the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory was found: in latent growth curve and multivariate autoregressive latent trajectory models, increases in the trajectory of state mindfulness experienced during meditation were significantly and robustly associated with more frequent use of positive reappraisal over the course of participation in the 8 week-long MBI. Thus, mindfulness and reappraisal may reciprocally enhance one another as interdependent components of a positive feedback loop whose structure might be best described as an upward spiral.

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Notes

  1. Though mindfulness and reappraisal may draw on a similar subset of neural resources among novices, among adept meditation practitioners mindfulness may be decidedly less effortful, and therefore rely on comparatively less prefrontal cortical activation than reappraisal (Hölzel et al. 2011).

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Acknowledgments

During the preparation of this manuscript, E.L.G. was supported by National Institutes of Health grant number DA037005 and LGK was supported by Grant Number HL119977.

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Correspondence to Eric L. Garland.

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Eric L. Garland, Laura G. Kiken, Kim Faurot, Olafur Palsson, and Susan A. Gaylord declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation and informed consent was obtained from each participant.

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Garland, E.L., Kiken, L.G., Faurot, K. et al. Upward Spirals of Mindfulness and Reappraisal: Testing the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory with Autoregressive Latent Trajectory Modeling. Cogn Ther Res 41, 381–392 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-016-9768-y

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