Meditation effects on behavior: state of the art in contemplative neuroscience and a practical application of mindfulness-based intervention to boost psychological well-being.

Objectives: The benefits provided by mindfulness meditation both at neural and behavioral level among clinical and non-clinical populations have been largely reported in literature. Existing Mindfulness-Based Programs are particularly useful to targeting specific populations while researchers have pointed out the possibility of developing programs adapted to the audience and the context which are intended to be applied on. In this two-groups pre-post experimental design we developed a mindfulness-based social intervention program to target healthy beginners of meditation and we tested its effect on participants’ psychological functioning through eight self-reported questionnaires (CORE-OM, FFMQ, SWLS, PANAS, PSS, SCS, WEMWBS, SHS) that encompass different domains of well-being, mindfulness and emotional functioning. Methods: Participants were randomly allocated to treated or passive control groups and were aware of group allocation. The intervention comprises a 12 weeks meditation training in a big group that represents the social aspect of meditation. Data were analyzed following an intention to treat scenario by fitting a linear mixed effect model. Results: Statistically significant results were obtained for global score of CORE-OM (β=-0.20[-0.30;-0.10], p=0.0002), FFMQ (β=0.20[0.12;-0.28], p<0.0001), SWLS (β=1.43[0.42;2.45], p=0.006), positive PANAS (β=1.99[0.95;3.04], p=0.0002), negative PANAS (β=-1.67[-2.92;-0.43], p=0.009), PSS (β=-2.98[-4.25;-1.71], p<0.0001), WEMWBS (β=4.38[2.93;5.83], p<0.0001), and SHS (β=1.43[0.42;2.45], p=0.006). Conclusions: The results of the study showed that our intervention leads to an improvement in the treated group compared to controls, in most of the psychological scales we tested. Our intervention could be considered as a preventive measure that may potentially reduce the risk of developing psychological problems and improve the subject’s general well-being.