Attention improvement by a brief mindfulness instruction, and its relationship with anxiety.

Abstract

In this study was the effect of a brief mindfulness instruction on the influence on progression of executive attention measured. A second purpose of this study was to examine weather anxiety would have a decreasing role in progression of attention. Subjects were 82 participants (66% female) who were assigned over an experimental group, and control group with a similar non-mindfulness task. All participants completed an anxiety measure, and before and after the interventions an attention task to measure the difference in executive attention. In a Mixed design was on both groups a significant progression on executive attention found, and no exclusive effect of the brief mindfulness instruction. Also no correlations between anxiety and level of progression of attention were found. However not in the scope of this study, actually, the results implicated the possibility of highly improvement of executive attention on a short term. Possible explanations for these findings, and suggestions for further research were discussed.