Three Ways Mindfulness Reduces Depression by Emily Nauman

From The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, this is a summary of recent research demonstrating three ways that mindfulness can benefit depression.

Three Ways Mindfulness Reduces Depression

Research says that Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy is an effective treatment for depression. A new study finds out why.

By Emily Nauman | June 2, 2014

Our Mindful Mondays series provides ongoing coverage of the exploding field of mindfulness research. Dan Archer

Sixty percent of people who experience a single episode of depression are likely to experience a second. Ninety percent of people who go through three episodes of depression are likely to have a fourth. But help is available: The 8-week Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) program been shown to reduce the risk of relapse.

How does it work? To find out, researchers in the United Kingdom interviewed 11 adults who had experienced three or more episodes of severe depression, and had undergone MBCT within the previous three years.

They analyzed the interviews to create a model, published in the journal Mindfulness, to demonstrate how MBCT enables people to relate mindfully to the self and with others. The key, it seems, lies in the way MBCT enhances relationships: Less stress about relationships in turn helps prevent future episodes of depression. Three specific themes emerged from the study:

1. Being present to the self: Learning to pause, identify, and respond

Mindfulness practices of MBCT allowed people to be more intentionally aware of the present moment, which gave them space to pause before reacting automatically to others. Instead of becoming distressed about rejection or criticism, they stepped back to understand their own automatic reactions—and to become more attuned to others’ needs and emotions. Awareness gave them more choice in how to respond, instead of becoming swept up in escalating negative emotion.

2. Facing fears: It’s ok to say “no”

Participants also reported that they became more assertive in saying ‘no’ to others in order to lessen their load of responsibility, allowing them to become more balanced in acknowledging their own as well as others’ needs. The authors speculate that bringing mindful awareness to uncomfortable experiences helped people to approach situations that they would previously avoid, which fostered self-confidence and assertiveness.

3. Being present with others

Being present to others enabled people to bring more attention to relationships and to appreciate their time with others. They talked about how being present to others helped them let go of distressing histories, allowing them to relate to others in new ways. Disagreements also became more constructive, as participants were able to identify their communication problems, and were better able to take on another’s perspective and focus on potential solutions.

Study participants also described having more energy, feeling less overwhelmed by negative emotion, and being in a better position to cope with and support others. Getting through difficulties with significant others through mindful communication helped them feel closer, and having the energy and emotional stamina to spend more time with family members helped them grow together.

Many participants said that as time went on, the benefits of MBCT permeated their whole life. “Through relating mindfully to their own experiences and to others, they were feeling more confident and were engaging with an increased range of social activity and involvement,” write the authors.

The researchers write that in the future, interventions could place a more explicit focus on approaching relationships with mindfulness. This focus could reinforce the benefit of MBCT, and perhaps lead to even better outcomes in reducing the risk of relapse for people with chronic depression.

About The Author

Emily Nauman is a GGSC research assistant. She completed her undergraduate studies at Oberlin College with a double major in Psychology and French, and has previously worked as a research assistant in Oberlin’s Psycholinguistics lab and Boston University’s Eating Disorders Program.

More on Mindfulness & Depression

• Discover how a wandering mind can become unhappy.
• Christine Carter explains what to do when you feel unhappy.
• Explore how mindfulness is being used to treat sexual dysfunction in women.
• Read Paul Gilbert's essay on to mindfully turn your brain from anger to compassion.
• How mindful are you? Take our quiz!

Juliana Breines - Why Do We Blame Victims?

Using the NFL's bullying situation in Miami as a jumping off point, this article from the Greater Good Science Center looks at why we tend to so easily blame the victims in any situation.

Why Do We Blame Victims?

Why do so many people take the side of bullies over their victims? The answers might surprise you.

By Juliana Breines | April 8, 2014


According to a recent report from the NFL, Miami Dolphins player Richie Incognito (left, number 68) bullied Jonathan Martin (right, 71). Lynne Sladky/AP
Near the end of last year, Miami Dolphins player Jonathan Martin left the team due to mistreatment from teammates, which included receiving threatening phone messages from another player.

The incident raised concerns about hazing within the NFL, but it also prompted some to suggest that Martin himself bears at least partial responsibility for his fate. For example, another NFL player stated in an interview that Martin is “just as much to blame because he allowed it to happen” and should have behaved like a man. Others argued that Martin was oversensitive and made himself an easy target. We heard similar sentiments when college player Michael Sam and former NFL player Wade Davis recently came out as gay.

This sort of victim-blaming is not unique to bullying cases. It can be seen when rape victims’ sexual histories are dissected, when people living in poverty are viewed as lazy and unmotivated, when those suffering from mental or physical illness are presumed to have invited disease through their own bad choices. There are cases where victims may indeed hold some responsibility for their misfortune, but all too often this responsibility is overblown and other factors are discounted.

Why are we so eager to blame victims, even when we have seemingly nothing to gain?

Victim-blaming is not just about avoiding culpability—it’s also about avoiding vulnerability. The more innocent a victim, the more threatening they are. Victims threaten our sense that the world is a safe and moral place, where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. When bad things happen to good people, it implies that no one is safe, that no matter how good we are, we too could be vulnerable. The idea that misfortune can be random, striking anyone at any time, is a terrifying thought, and yet we are faced every day with evidence that it may be true.

In the 1960s, social psychologist Dr. Melvin Lerner conducted a famous serious of studies which found that when participants observed another person receiving electric shocks and were unable to intervene, they began to derogate the victims. The more unfair and severe the suffering appeared to be, the greater the derogation.

Follow-up studies found that a similar phenomenon occurs when people evaluate victims of car accidents, rape, domestic violence, illness, and poverty. Research conducted by Dr. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman suggests that victims sometimes even derogate themselves, locating the cause of their suffering in their own behavior—but not in their enduring characteristics—in an effort to make negative events seem more controllable and therefore more avoidable in the future.

Lerner theorized that these victim blaming tendencies are rooted in the belief in a just world, a world where actions have predictable consequences and people can control what happens to them. It is captured in common phrases like “what goes around comes around” and “you reap what you sow.” We want to believe that justice will come to wrongdoers, whereas good, honest people who follow the rules will be rewarded.

Research has found, not surprisingly, that people who believe that the world is a just place are happier and less depressed. But this happiness may come at a cost—it may reduce our empathy for those who are suffering, and we may even contribute to their suffering by increasing stigmatization.

So is the only alternative to belief in a just world a sense of helplessness and depression? Not at all.

In February, the NFL itself published a 144-page report on the Martin incident that compelled the organization to strengthen its code of conduct on and off the field. The report also triggered far-reaching conversations about bullying among owners, coaches, sports journalists, and players.

When Wade Davis spoke last month about being gay in the NFL to a gathering of owners and coaches, the press reported a positive response from the audience. “It’s got to be in the conversation,” Denver Broncos coach John Fox told ESPN. “I’ve probably not done as good a job with that up until now, but after Wade’s presentation, it’s high on my list the first time I talk to my staff when we get back and my football team.’’

People can believe that the world is full of injustice but also believe that they are capable of making the world a more just place through their own actions. One way to help make the world a better place to fight the impulse to rationalize others’ suffering, and to recognize that it could have just as soon been us in their shoes.

This recognition can be unsettling, but it may also be the only way that we can truly open our hearts to others’ suffering and help them feel supported and less alone. What the world may lack in justice we can at least try to make up for in compassion.

How Does Mindfulness Improve Self-Control? (from Greater Good)

This excellent article, from UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, looks at recent research (by talking with the author of the research) that suggests a mindfulness practice can increase our sense of self-control. This is part of the Mindful Monday series from Greater Good.

How Does Mindfulness Improve Self-Control? 

By Emily Nauman | March 24, 2014

In a new installment of our Mindful Monday series, we talk with researcher Rimma Teper about how mindfulness helps improve executive function. 

We have emotions for a reason. Anger in response to injustice can signal that the situation needs to change; sadness in response to loss can signal that we’d like to keep the people we love in our lives.

Our Mindful Mondays series provides ongoing coverage of the exploding field of mindfulness research. Dan Archer

It’s when we ruminate, or get caught up in our emotions, that they might become maladaptive. That’s when emotion regulation can be helpful and healthy.

Previous research has shown that mindfulness can be an effective tool to help regulate our emotions. But why? A new model suggests that the ability to control one’s behavior—a concept that researchers call executive control—may play a role.

In a recent paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, researcher Rimma Teper and her colleagues at the University of Toronto write that, despite the common misconception that meditation “empties our head” of emotions, mindfulness actually helps us become more aware and accepting of emotional signals—which helps us to control our behavior.

I talked with Rimma Teper about how mindfulness relates to emotion regulation, and how executive control fits into the picture.

Emily Nauman: In your paper, you write that mindfulness helps us change our attitude toward an emotion, rather than focusing on changing an emotion itself. What is the difference between changing our relationship to an emotion and changing the emotion itself? What’s beneficial about the former?

Rimma Teper: I should start off by saying that I am of the view that emotional experiences are mostly a good thing! We, as humans, evolved to have emotional responses to certain situations that actually help us in our everyday lives.

For instance, feeling fear when you see a snake signals that you should stay away. Feeling love for your family and friends promotes behaviors that foster close relationships. Of course, there are cases where emotional responses may be overblown, or maladaptive—and this is where emotion regulation becomes a necessary tool. Mindfulness is just one strategy that can help with emotion regulation.

As you mentioned, most emotion regulation strategies that people engage in change the nature of the emotion. These strategies may include reevaluating the situation that elicited the emotion, or suppressing the emotion altogether through distraction or some other means. Mindfulness, on the other hand, encourages people to observe their emotional experiences without trying to change them.

I think that one benefit of this approach is that it discards the tendency of “labeling” one’s emotions as good or bad. It encourages people to simply observe the contents of their mind. In this way, I think that mindfulness allows for greater self-insight.

So for instance, if I feel angry, I might try to observe my thoughts without getting caught up in them. I would also pay attention to the bodily sensations that accompany that emotion, like my heart beating quickly. By paying attention to way in which the emotion unfolds in your body, step-by-step, mindful people are able delay and dampen the rumination or overblown reaction that often accompanies it.



EN: What is executive control, and why did you suspect that executive control plays a role in the link between mindfulness and emotion regulation?

RT: Executive control can often be equated with willpower. There are a number of skills that fall under the umbrella of executive control, but the one that is specifically related to mindfulness is the ability to inhibit one’s impulses.

Previous research, including some of our own, has suggested that mindfulness may help to improve executive control. In addition, a lot of previous research has also linked mindfulness to improvements in emotion regulation.

But no one really knew exactly how mindfulness improved emotion regulation. This “gap” in the research made us wonder whether executive control might be the pathway through which mindful people are better able to regulate their emotions.

After all, executive control involves the inhibition of automatic or impulsive behaviors. And for most of us, getting carried away with our emotions is something we do automatically and without notice. When we feel sad or angry, we often let our emotions snowball. We also often ruminate about negative things that have happened to us. So to us, it made sense that executive control would be involved in curbing these maladaptive patterns.

EN: How have people thought about mindfulness and emotion regulation in the past, and what insights does your model bring to our understanding of how mindfulness and emotion regulation are related?

RT: The link between mindfulness and improved emotion regulation is certainly not a new one. What our model does is examine the nature of this relationship and helps to understand how mindfulness may improve emotion regulation.

There is often a misconception that mindfulness simply leads to less emotionality, or that mindful people experience less emotion.

Our model proposes that this is not the case. Specifically, we suggest that mindfulness leads to improvements in emotion regulation not by eliminating or reducing emotional experience, but rather through a present-moment awareness and acceptance of emotional experience. This sort of attentive and open stance towards one’s own emotions and thoughts allows the individual to still experience emotion, but also to detect emotions early on and stop them from spiraling out of control.

EN: How can we apply the insights of this model to our daily lives? What’s useful about understanding that mindfulness helps us become aware of and accept emotions, rather than “emptying our head” of emotions?

RT: As I mentioned before, emotions are usually a good thing! But there are also cases when they can be disruptive and maladaptive.

So rather than getting rid of emotional experience altogether, our model provides insight into the ways in which we can prevent or limit the disruptive aspects of emotions, like rumination. And this can be done by monitoring your thoughts and sensations, but also by adopting a non-judgmental attitude towards them.

Feeling Self-Critical? Try Mindfulness (Emily Nauman at Greater Good)

This is a brief but useful article from the Greater Good Science Center (UC Berkeley) on using mindfulness to deal with inner critic, although they frame it more in terms of self-esteem.

I would suggest using mindfulness directly in the inner critic by learning to identify its voice, its criticisms, and then be curious about the reasons the critic might be acting this way. What does it want? What are its needs? How is it trying to serve you?

And that last question is crucial - when we begin to understand that all of our "parts," including (and maybe especially) the inner critic, came into existence to help us in some way, then our relationship with them can shift from adversarial to cooperative.

Feeling Self-Critical? Try Mindfulness

New research shows that mindfulness may help us to stop comparing ourselves to other people

By Emily Nauman | March 9, 2014


Our Mindful Mondays series provides ongoing coverage of the exploding field of mindfulness research. Dan Archer
Many of us feel great about ourselves when we focus on how much success we’ve had in comparison to others. But what happens when we don’t succeed? Self-esteem sinks. 

New research shows that developing mindfulness skills may help us build secure self-esteem—that is, self-esteem that endures regardless of our success in comparison to those around us.

Christopher Pepping and his colleagues at Griffith University in Australia conducted two studies to demonstrate that mindfulness skills help enhance self-esteem.

In the first study, the researchers administered questionnaires to undergraduate students in an introductory psychology course to measure their mindfulness skills and their self-esteem. The researchers anticipated that four aspects of mindfulness would predict higher self-esteem:

• Labeling internal experiences with words, which might prevent people from getting consumed by self-critical thoughts and emotions;
• Bringing a non-judgmental attitude toward thoughts and emotions, which could help individuals have a neutral, accepting attitude toward the self;
• Sustaining attention on the present moment, which could help people avoid becoming caught up in self-critical thoughts that relate to events from the past or future;
• Letting thoughts and emotions enter and leave awareness without reacting to them.

The results, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, support the researchers’ predictions: students with these mindfulness skills indeed had higher self-esteem. However, this study did not clarify whether mindfulness causes self-esteem, or whether those with mindfulness also had higher self-esteem because of some other factor.

In order to find out if mindfulness directly causes higher self-esteem, the researchers conducted a second study. They instructed half of the participants to complete a 15-minute mindfulness meditation that focused on the sensation of their breath. The other half of participants read a 15-minute story about Venus fly-trap plants. All of the participants completed questionnaires that assessed their level of self-esteem and mindfulness both before and after they completed the 15-minute task.

Consistent with the researchers’ predictions, those that participated in the mindfulness meditation had higher scores in mindfulness and in self-esteem after meditating, while there was no change in these dimensions for those that read the Venus fly-trap plant story.

Because the only difference between the two groups was whether or not they participated in a mindfulness exercise, these results suggest that mindfulness directly causes enhanced self-esteem.

The authors write that because the effects of the mindfulness exercise on self-esteem in this study were temporary, future research should examine if mindfulness interventions can lead to long-term changes in self-esteem.

However, these findings are promising. The authors write, “Mindfulness may be a useful way to address the underlying processes associated with low self-esteem, without temporarily bolstering positive views of oneself by focusing on achievement or other transient factors. In brief, mindfulness may assist individuals to experience a more secure form of high self-esteem.”

About The Author

Emily Nauman is a GGSC research assistant. She completed her undergraduate studies at Oberlin College with a double major in Psychology and French, and has previously worked as a research assistant in Oberlin’s Psycholinguistics lab and Boston University’s Eating Disorders Program.

Related Articles

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• Why Self-Compassion Trumps Self-Esteem
• How Does Mindfulness Help Cultivate Self-Compassion?
• Can Mindfulness Foster a Healthy Body Image?
• Fostering Optimism and Confidence
• Better Eating through Mindfulness
• Five Ways to Make Mindfulness More Manly
• Does Mindfulness Make You More Compassionate?
• Can Mindfulness Help People Cope with Discrimination?
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Shauna Shapiro - How Mindfulness Cultivates Compassion

 

From the Greater Good blog via UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center - a little Friday wisdom on how we can generate greater compassion through mindfulness practice. Shauna Shapiro is coauthor, with Linda E. Carlson, of The Art and Science of Mindfulness: Integrating Mindfulness into Psychology and the Helping Professions.

How Mindfulness Cultivates Compassion

January 2014 | TRT 16:18


The author and researcher explores how moment-to-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and surrounding helps us to see and alleviate suffering in others.

Shauna Shapiro explains why mindfulness-based therapies work to develop compassion.

Shauna Shapiro, Ph.D., is associate professor of counseling psychology at Santa Clara University. She has conducted extensive clinical research investigating the effects of mindfulness-based therapies across a wide range of populations, and published over 70 book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. She currently lectures and leads mindfulness training programs nationally and internationally for health professionals on the growing applications of mindfulness in psychology and health care. She is coauthor, with Linda E. Carlson, of The Art and Science of Mindfulness: Integrating Mindfulness into Psychology and the Helping Professions.

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The Top 10 Insights from the “Science of a Meaningful Life” in 2013 (Greater Good Science Center)

From UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, here is a collection of 10 research summaries on topics related to having a meaningful life, for example the idea that a meaningful and healthy life is not the same as a happy life; or that mindfulness meditation can make people more altruistic (even when doing so has barriers) and that the emotional benefits of altruism are likely to be human universals.

There is some nice research summarized here - and for a nice change of pace, the news is good.

The Top 10 Insights from the “Science of a Meaningful Life” in 2013

Below are some of the most surprising, provocative, and inspiring findings published this past year.

By Jason Marsh, Devan Davison, Bianca Lorenz, Lauren Klein, Jeremy Adam Smith, Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas

January 2, 2014


The past few years have been marked by two major trends in the science of a meaningful life.

One is that researchers continued to add sophistication and depth to our understanding of positive feelings and behaviors. Happiness is good for you, but not all the time; empathy ties us together, and can overwhelm you; humans are born with an innate sense of fairness and morality, that changes in response to context. This has been especially true of the study of mindfulness and attention, which is producing more and more potentially life-changing discoveries.

The other factor involves intellectual diversity. The turn from the study of human dysfunction to human strengths and virtues may have started in psychology, with the positive psychology movement, but that perspective spread to adjacent disciplines like neuroscience and criminology, and from there to fields like sociology, economics, and medicine. Across all these fields, we’re seeing more and more support for the idea that empathy, compassion, and happiness are more than you-have-it-or-not capacities, but skills that can be cultivated by individuals and by groups of people through deliberate decisions.

In 2013, the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center is now part of a mature, multidisciplinary movement. Here are 10 scientific insights published in peer-reviewed journals from the past year that we anticipate will be cited in scientific studies, help shift public debate, and change individual behavior in the year to come.

A meaningful life is different—and healthier—than a happy one.

The research we cover here at the Greater Good Science Center is often referred to as “the science of happiness,” yet our tagline is “The Science of a Meaningful Life.” Meaning, happiness—is there a difference?

New research suggests that there is. When a study in the Journal of Positive Psychology tried to disentangle the concepts of “meaning” and “happiness” by surveying roughly 400 Americans, it found considerable overlap between the two—but also some key distinctions.

Based on those surveys, for instance, feeling good and having one’s needs met seem integral to happiness but unrelated to meaning. Happy people seem to dwell in the present moment, not the past or future, whereas meaning seems to involve linking past, present, and future. People derive meaningfulness (but not necessarily happiness) from helping others—being a “giver”—whereas people derive happiness (but not necessarily meaningfulness) from being a “taker.” And while social connections are important to meaning and happiness, the type of connection matters: Spending time with friends is important to happiness but not meaning, whereas the opposite is true for spending time with loved ones.

And other research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that these differences might have important implications for our health. When Barbara Fredrickson and Steve Cole compared the immune cells of people who reported being “happy” with those of people who reported “a sense of direction and meaning,” the people leading meaningful lives seemed to have stronger immune systems.

The emotional benefits of altruism might be a human universal.

One of the most significant findings to have emerged from the sciences of happiness and altruism has been this: Altruism boosts happiness. Spending on others makes us happier than spending on ourselves—at least among the relatively affluent North Americans who have participated in this research.

But a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggested that this finding holds up around the world, even in countries where sharing with others might threaten someone’s own subsistence.

In one study, the researchers examined data of more than 200,000 people from 136 countries; they determined that donating to charity in the past month boosts happiness “in most individual countries and all major regions of the world,” cutting across cultures and levels of economic well-being. It was even true regardless of whether someone said they’d had trouble securing food for their family in the past year.

When the researchers zeroed in on three countries with vastly different levels of wealth—Canada, Uganda, and India—they found that people reported greater happiness recalling a time when they’d spent money on others than when they’d spent on themselves. And in a study comparing Canada and South Africa, people reported feeling happier after donating to charity than after buying themselves a treat, even though they would never meet the beneficiary of their largess. This suggests to the researchers that their happiness didn’t result from feeling like they were strengthening social connections or improving their reputation but from a deeply ingrained human instinct.

In fact, they argue, the nearly universal emotional benefits of altruism suggest it is a product of evolution, perpetuating behavior that “may have carried short-term costs but long-term benefits for survival over human evolutionary history.”

Mindfulness meditation makes people more altruistic—even when confronted with barriers to compassionate action.

In March, the GGSC hosted a conference called “Practicing Mindfulness & Compassion,” where speakers made the case that the practice of mindfulness—the moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and surrounding—doesn’t just improve our individual health but also makes us more compassionate toward others. Coincidentally, just weeks after the conference, two new studies bolstered this claim.

The first study, published in Psychological Science, found that people who took an eight-week mindfulness meditation course were significantly more likely than a control group to give up their waiting-room seat for a person on crutches. This was true despite the fact that other people in the waiting room (who were secretly working with the researchers) didn’t acknowledge the person in need or make any gesture to give up their own seats; prior research suggests that this kind of inaction strongly deters bystanders from helping out, but that wasn’t the case when the bystanders had received training in mindfulness.

A few weeks later, another study published in Psychological Science echoed that finding. In this second study, which was unrelated to the first, people who had practiced a mindfulness-based “compassion meditation” for a total of just seven hours over two weeks were significantly more likely than people who hadn’t received the training to give money to a stranger in need. What’s more, after completing their training, the meditation group showed noticeable changes in brain activity, including in networks linked to understanding the suffering of others.

“Our findings,” write the authors of the second study, “support the possibility that compassion and altruism can be viewed as trainable skills rather than as stable traits.”

Meditation changes gene expression.

Are genes destiny? They certainly influence our behavior and health outcomes—for example, one study published in 2013 found that genes make some people more inclined to focus on the negative. But more and more research is revealing how it’s a two-way street: Our choices can also influence how our genes behave.

In 2013, a collaborative project between researchers in Spain and France and at the University of Wisconsin found that when experienced meditators meditate, they quiet down the genes that express bodily inflammation in response to stress.

How did they figure this out? Before and after two different retreat days, the researchers drew blood samples from 19 long-term meditators (averaging more than 6000 lifetime hours) and 21 inexperienced people. During the retreat, the meditators meditated and discussed the benefits and advantages of meditation; the non-meditators read, played games, and walked around.

After this experience, the meditators’ inflammation genes—measured by blood concentrations of enzymes that catalyze or are a byproduct of gene expression—were less active. Blood samples from the people in the leisure-day condition did not show these changes.

Why does this matter? The researchers also looked at their study participants’ ability to recover from a stressful event. Long-term meditators’ ability to turn down inflammatory genes, it turns out, predicted how quickly stress hormones in their saliva diminished after a stressful experience—a sign of healthy coping and resilience that can potentially lead to a longer life.

This is good news to people who come from a family of stress cases who are stress-prone themselves: There are steps you can take to mitigate the impact of stressful events. Hard as it may be to find time or get excited about meditating, mounting evidence suggests that it can offer more concrete advantages to a healthy life than the leisurely activities we more readily seek.

Mindfulness training improves teachers’ performance in the classroom.

For educators grappling with students’ behavioral problems and other sources of stress, new research suggested an effective response: mindfulness.

Although mindfulness-based programs are not uncommon in schools these days, they’ve mainly been deployed to enhance students’ social, emotional, and cognitive skills; only a handful of programs and studies have examined the benefits of mindfulness for teachers, and in those cases, the research has focused largely on the general benefits for teachers’ mental health.

But in 2013, researchers at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds broke new ground when they studied the impact of an eight-week mindfulness course developed specifically for teachers, looking not only at its effects on the teachers’ emotional well-being and levels of stress but also on their performance in the classroom.

They found that teachers randomly assigned to take the course felt less anxious, depressed, and burned out afterward, and felt more compassionate toward themselves. What’s more, according to experts who watched the teachers in action, these teachers ran more productive classrooms after completing the course and improved at managing their students’ behavior as well. The results, published in Mind, Brain, and Education, show that stress and burnout levels actually increased among teachers who didn’t take the course.

The researchers speculate that mindfulness may carry these benefits for teachers because it helps them cope with classroom stress and stay focused on their work. “Mindfulness-based practices offer promise as a tool for enhancing teaching quality,” write the researchers, “which may, in turn, promote positive student outcomes and school success.”

There’s nothing simple about happiness.

Who doesn’t want to be happy? Happy is always good, right?

Sure. Just don’t be too happy, OK? Because June Gruber and her colleagues analyzed health data and found that it’s much better to be a little bit happy over a long period of time than to experience wild spikes in happiness. Another study, published in the journal Emotion, showed how seeking happiness at the right time may be more important than seeking happiness all the time. Instead, allowing yourself to feel emotions appropriate to a situation—whether or not they are pleasant in the moment—is a key to long-lasting happiness.

In a study published earlier in the year in the journal Psychological Science, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Kristin Layous found that not all research-approved happiness practices work for everyone all the time. “Let’s say you publish a study that shows being grateful makes you happy—which it does,” Lyubomirsky recently told us. “But, actually, it’s much harder than that. It’s actually very hard to be grateful, and to be grateful on a regular basis, and at the right time, and for the right things.” She continued:

So, for example, some people have a lot of social support, some people have little social support, some people are extroverted, some people are introverted—you have to take into account the happiness seeker before you give them advice about what should make them happy. And then there are factors relevant to the activity that you do. How is it that you’re trying to become happier? How is it that you’re trying to stave off adaptation? Are you trying to appreciate more? Are you trying to do more acts of kindness? Are you trying to savor the moment? The kind of person you are, the different kinds of activities, and how often you do them, and where you do them—these are all going to matter.

The bottom line might be that if happiness were really that simple, we’d all be happy all the time. But we’re not, and that appears to be because there is no rigid formula for happiness. It’s a state that comes and goes in response to how we’re changing and how our world is changing.

Gratitude can save your life.

Or at least help lessen suicidal thoughts, says a study published in the Journal of Research in Personality.

Across a four-week period, 209 college students answered questions to measure depression, suicidal thoughts, grit, gratitude, and meaning in life. The idea was to see if the positive traits—grit and gratitude—mitigated the negative ones. Since depression is a large contributing factor to suicide, they controlled for that variable throughout the study.

Grit, said the authors, is “characterized by the long-term interests and passions, and willingness to persevere through obstacles and setbacks to make progress toward goals aligned or separate from these passionate pursuits.” It stands to reason that someone with lots of grit wouldn’t waste much time on suicidal thoughts.

But what about gratitude? That entails noticing the benefits and gifts received from others, and it gives an individual a sense of belonging. That should make life living—and, indeed, the researchers found that gratitude and grit worked synergistically together to make life more meaningful and to reduce suicidal thoughts, independent of depression symptoms.

As the authors note, their study has huge clinical implications: If therapists can specifically foster gratitude in suicidal people, they should be able to increase their sense that life is worth living. This new finding adds to a pile of new research on the benefits of gratitude. Saying “thanks” can make you happier, sustain your marriage through tough times, reduce envy, and even improve physical health.

Employees are motivated by giving as well as getting.

Over the past two decades, work satisfaction has declined, while time spent at work has significantly increased. Not a good combination!

Would paying people more money help? Some studies have shown that rewarding employees for their hard work and late nights at the office with a bonus will make things a little better and quiet dissatisfaction. But in September, through the collaborative research of Lalin Anik, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton, Elizabeth W. Dunn, and Jordi Quoidbach, we learned that employee bonuses might have the most positive effects when they’re spent on others. The researchers suggested an alternative bonus offer that has the potential to provide some of the same benefits as team-based compensation—increased social support, cohesion, and performance—while carrying fewer drawbacks.

Their first experiment focused on broad, self-reported measures of the impact of prosocial bonuses on an employee’s job satisfaction. They were either given a bonus to spend on charity or were not given a bonus at all. Those who gave to charities reported increased happiness and job satisfaction. The second experiment was conducted in two parts—both focused on “sports team orientation” by looking at the difference between donating to a charity or a fellow employee—and attempted to see if these improved actual performance. In the first part of the experiment, these participants were given $20 and told to spend it on a teammate or on themselves over the course of the week. In the second part of this experiment, they were instructed to spend $22 on themselves or on a specified teammate over the course of the week. Both of these experiments found more positive effects for givers than those who spent the $22 on themselves.

This collaborative research indicates that prosocial bonuses can benefit both individuals and teams, on both psychological and “bottom line” indicators, in both the short and long-term. So when you receive your bonus this year, you might want to think twice before buying those pair of shoes you’ve been dying for, instead consider spending it on someone else—because, according to this research, you’ll probably be much happier and more satisfied with your job.

Subtle contextual factors influence our sense of right and wrong.

An out-of-control train will kill five people. You can switch the train onto another track and save them—but doing so will kill one person. What should you do?

A series of experiments published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that on one day you’ll divert the train and save those five lives—but on another you might not. It all depends on how the dilemma is framed and how we’ve been thinking about ourselves.

Through the train dilemma and other experiments, the study revealed two factors that can influence our moral decisions. The first involves how morality has been defined for you, in this case around consequences or rules. For example, when researchers asked participants to think in terms of consequences, some readily diverted the train, thus saving four lives. On the other hand, those who prompted to think in terms of rules (e.g., “thou shalt not kill”) let the five die. But that factor was influenced by another that depends on memory and whether your past ethical or unethical behavior is on your mind—a memory of a good deed might make you more likely to cheat, for example, if urged to think of consequences. It’s the complex interaction between those two factors that shapes your decision.

That wasn’t the only study published during the past year that revealed how susceptible we are to context. One study found that people are more moral in the morning than in the afternoon. Another study, cleverly titled “Hunger Games,” found that when people are hungry, they express more support for charitable giving. Yet another experiment discovered that thinking about money makes you more inclined to cheat at a game—but thinking about time keeps you honest.

The bottom line is that our sense of right and wrong is heavily influenced by seemingly trivial variables in memory, in our bodies, and in changes within our environment. This doesn’t necessarily lead us to pessimistic conclusions about humanity—in fact, knowing how our minds work might help us to make better moral decisions.

Anyone can cultivate empathic skills—even psychopaths.

In daily life, calling someone a “psychopath” or a “sociopath” is a way of saying that the person is beyond redemption. Are they?

When neuroscientist James Fallon accidentally discovered that his brain resembled that of a psychopath—showing less activity in areas of the frontal lobe linked to empathy—he was confused. After all, Fallon was a happily married man, with a career and good relationships with colleagues. How could he be beyond redemption?

Additional genetic tests revealed “high-risk alleles for aggression, violence and low empathy.” What was going on? Fallon decided he was a “pro-social psychopath,” someone whose genetic and neurological inheritance makes it hard for him to feel empathy, but who was gifted with a good upbringing and environment—good enough to overcome latent psychopathic tendencies.

This self-description found support in a study published this year by Swiss and German researchers, which showed education levels and “social desirability” seemed to improve empathy in diagnosed psychopaths. Another new study found that empathy deficits don’t necessarily lead to aggression.

It seems that psychopaths can be taught to feel empathy and compassion, though they have a disability that makes developing those skills difficult. When a team of researchers looked at the brain activity of psychopathic criminals in the Netherlands, for example, they discovered the predictable empathic deficits. But they also found that it made a difference in their brains to simply ask the criminals to empathize with others—hinting that empathy may be repressed rather than missing entirely in people classified as psychopaths. For some, at least, it may help a great deal to lift that repression.

Psychopathy remains an intractable mental illness and social problem—this year’s studies of treatment did not reveal a magic bullet that would turn psychopaths into angels. But we can take heart in the fact that if they can develop empathic skills, anyone can.

This is a good article from UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center on the long-term impact of bullying - both on the bullied and the bully. We already know that bullied children struggle with depression, suicide attempts, physical health problems, and reduced academic achievement.

Researchers began this study with 11-13 year-old children - to me this is late, since a lot of bullying occurs in 3-6 grades, as well as later.

They identified three primary groups: bullies, victims, and victim-bullies (those kids who are bullied and the pay it forward to someone lower in standing than they are). It turns out the bully-victims fare worst over the long-term in terms of physical health and were much more likely to diagnosed with a mental illness, to be regular smokers, and to take longer to heal from illness or injury.

How Bullied Children Grow into Wounded Adults

By Bianca Lorenz | December 18, 2013
Greater Good Science Center | UC Berkeley

A new longitudinal study finds children are affected by bullying throughout their lives—and reveals that even perpetrators can can struggle as adults.

Depression, suicide attempts, physical health problems, and reduced academic achievement—these are just a few of the negative effects bullying can have on children, according to many studies.

But what happens when those children grow into adults? Does childhood bullying lead to struggles in adulthood?


That’s the question tackled by researchers from the University of Warwick and Duke University Medical Center, whose results were published recently in the journal Psychological Science.

They began to follow participants in North Carolina at ages 11 to 13. The kids were assessed every year until age 16—and once again as young adults, at ages 19 to 26. All in all, 1,273 people participated in every stage of the study.

In childhood and adolescence, participants and their parents reported if they had been bullied or had bullied others in the previous three months. Researchers sorted those who experienced bullying into three categories: victims, bullies, and bully-victims—kids who had been both bullies and victims at some point in time.

As it turned out, victims outnumbered bullies in the study by three to one (305 vs. 100). But the largest portion of study participants formed a fourth category: Those who claimed to have had no experience at all with bullying (789 participants). Bullies were mostly boys, but victims could be either girls or boys.

Then, at the young adult stage, the researchers looked at factors like physical and mental health, risky behaviors, wealth, and social relationships—and they investigated whether the participants had acquired criminal records. When the researchers matched childhood bullying with adult outcomes, they discovered four key insights:

1. Bullying is most toxic for those who were both bullies and victims. “Bully-victims in school had the worst health outcomes in adulthood,” write the researchers, “with markedly increased likelihood of having been diagnosed with a serious illness, having been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, regular smoking, and slow recovery from illness.”
2. Bullies might be more likely to engage in risky or illegal behaviors in adulthood. When they grew up, bullies were more likely to have been convicted of felonies and to have abused drugs, and they actually tended to be poorer and lonelier than their former victims. However, when researchers controlled for childhood hardships like divorce or psychiatric problems, they found that a bully’s situation didn’t look quite as dim. In other words, bullies tended to have more troubled childhoods—and that may explain both their bullying and the greater likelihood of engaging in illegal behaviors down the road.
3. Victims tended to be more successful—but less healthy—than bullies in adulthood. In general, victimized kids grew up to do better than the kids who bullied them. They made more money, had more friends, and were much, much less likely to be convicted of a crime—but they still did worse than those who weren’t bullied at all. And their mental and physical health tended to be worse than everyone else. (When researchers controlled for other childhood hardships, the risks for both victims and bully-victims did not change.)
4. All three groups involved in bullying did worse than those who were not. Overall, kids who were touched by bullying—as bullies, victims, or bully-victims—ended up with less education and less money than those who said they had escaped bullying altogether. Kids who encountered bullying in any way also struggled more with social relationships than those were had no experience with bullying.

Thirty-eight percent of the 421 victims and bully-victims were chronically bullied—meaning that it kept happening throughout childhood. This subset often struggled the most, being poorer, less educated, and more isolated than everyone else.

Taken together, these results show how a child can be affected by bullying throughout his or her life—but also reveals that a child can suffer from bullying on both sides of the spectrum, as victim and perpetrator.

“Being bullied is not a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up,” conclude the authors, “but throws a long shadow over affected children’s lives.”

Adam Hoffman - When Empathy Hurts, Compassion Can Heal (Greater Good)

At UC Berkeley's Greater Good blog, Adam Hoffman reports on the ever-increasing body of evidence that when we witness other people's pain and suffering, especially when we empathize, we can experience vicarious trauma. Being trained in compassion can help alleviate distress we experience.

When Empathy Hurts, Compassion Can Heal

A new neuroscientific study shows that compassion training can help us cope with other people's distress.

By Adam Hoffman | August 22, 2013

Empathy can be painful.

Or so suggests a growing body of neuroscientific research. When we witness suffering and distress in others, our natural tendency to empathize can bring us vicarious pain.

Catherine Choi

Is there a better way of approaching distress in other people? A recent study, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, suggests that we can better cope with others’ negative emotions by strengthening our own compassion skills, which the researchers define as “feeling concern for another’s suffering and desiring to enhance that individual’s welfare.”

“Empathy is really important for understanding others’ emotions very deeply, but there is a downside of empathy when it comes to the suffering of others,” says Olga Klimecki, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany and the lead author of the study. “When we share the suffering of others too much, our negative emotions increase. It carries the danger of an emotional burnout.”

The research team sent study participants to a one-day loving-kindness meditation class, which utilized techniques and philosophies from Eastern contemplative traditions. Participants, none of whom had prior meditation experience, practiced extending feelings of warmth and care toward themselves, a close person, a neutral person, a person in difficulty, and complete strangers, as a way of developing their compassion skills.

Both before and after the training, participants were shown videos of people in distress (e.g., crying after their home was flooded). Following exposure to each video, the researchers measured the subjects’ emotional responses through a survey. Their brain activity was also recorded using an fMRI machine, a device that tracks real-time blood-flow in the brain, thereby enabling the scientists to see what brain areas were active in response to viewing the videos.

They found that the compassion training led participants to experience significantly more positive emotion when viewing the distressing videos. In other words, they seemed better able to cope with distress than they did before the training—and they coped better than a control group that did not receive the compassion training.

“Through compassion training, we can increase our resilience and approach stressful situations with more positive affect,” says Klimecki.

The positive emotional approach was accompanied by a change in brain activation pattern: Before the training, participants showed activity in an “empathic” network associated with pain perception and unpleasantness; after the training, activity shifted to a “compassionate” network that has been associated with love and affiliation.

Their new brain-activation patterns more closely resembled those of an “expert” who had meditated every day on compassion for more than 35 years, whose brain was scanned by the researchers to provide a point of comparison. This result suggests that the training brought about fundamental changes in the ways their brains processed distressing scenes, strengthening the parts that try to alleviate suffering—an example of neuroplasticity, when the brain physically evolves in response to experience.

Negative emotions did not disappear after the loving-kindness training; it’s just that the participants were less likely to feel distressed themselves. According to Klimecki and her colleagues, this suggests that the training allowed participants to stay in touch with the negative emotion from a calmer mindset. “Compassion is a good antidote,” says Klimecki. “It allows us to connect to others’ suffering, without being too distressed.”

The main takeaway is that we can shape our own emotional reactions, and can alter the way we feel and respond to certain situations. In other words, says Klimecki, “Our emotions are not set in stone.”

So is taking a compassion course like the one offered through this study the only way to build compassion? Not necessarily. Research suggests you can cultivate a compassionate mindset through encouraging cooperation, practicing mindfulness, refraining from placing blame on others, acting against inequality, and being receptive to others’ feelings without adopting those feelings as your own.