title: Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation.
abstract: Recent studies suggest that months to years of intensive and systematic meditation training can improve attention. However, the lengthy training required has made it difficult to use random assignment of participants to conditions to confirm these findings. This article shows that a group randomly assigned to 5 days of meditation practice with the integrative body-mind training method shows significantly better attention and control of stress than a similarly chosen control group given relaxation training. The training method comes from traditional Chinese medicine and incorporates aspects of other meditation and mindfulness training. Compared with the control group, the experimental group of 40 undergraduate Chinese students given 5 days of 20-min integrative training showed greater improvement in conflict scores on the Attention Network Test, lower anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue, and higher vigor on the Profile of Mood States scale, a significant decrease in stress-related cortisol, and an increase in immunoreactivity. These results provide a convenient method for studying the influence of meditation training by using experimental and control methods similar to those used to test drugs or other interventions.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neuroinformatics and Laboratory for Body and Mind, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116023, China. yiyuan@uoregon.edu
authors.forename: Yi-Yuan
authors.initials: YY
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.forename: Yinghua
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.forename: Junhong
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Yaxin
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Fan
authors.forename: Shigang
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.forename: Qilin
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.forename: Qingbao
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.forename: Danni
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sui
authors.forename: Mary K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Rothbart
authors.forename: Ming
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fan
authors.forename: Michael I
authors.initials: MI
authors.lastname: Posner
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019122:Meditation / Q000379:methods*; D011581:Psychological Tests; D012927:Social Control, Informal; D013997:Time Factors