After the spectacular rise of Mindfulness in the last decade, a lot of research has been generated in order to prove its effectiveness in a growing number of areas of human physical and mental health.

Thus, Mindfulness has extended from the original medical practice (application in patients with chronic pain and cancer) to the different aspects of psychology, such as clinical, organizational/business, educational or sports-related, mainly.

Focusing on the area of education and the application of Mindfulness techniques in children and adolescents , we will see how the effectiveness of this type of intervention can be verified by presenting the findings of two recent meta-analyses.

What is a meta-analysis?

A meta-analysis is a scientific and statistical work that brings together a large group of research studies on the same subject in order to analyse them together. Thus, it could be said that a meta-analysis would be equivalent to a review of all the published literature which, as a summary, compares the scientific rigor of all the studies as a whole.

Therefore, the validity and reliability that a meta-analysis has is very high and provides data with greater consistency, greater statistical power and greater precision in relation to all the variables that may be playing a significant role in the results due to the fact that the experimental population samples (the groups of subjects that participate) are very large.

In addition, it allows to observe if there are methodological issues in the studies that may be conditioning the data obtained in them.

The effectiveness of Mindfulness in young people

The results of the two indicated meta-analyses, found in recent databases, both of international origin (Germany and the USA respectively) on the efficacy of Mindfulness techniques in the infant/youth population will be presented below.

Full-care interventions in schools

The meta-analysis prepared by Zenner et al (2014) used a selection of publications from 12 databases and contact with experts in the field. 24 investigations were taken , of which 13 were published and 9 of them had comparative measures between experimental and control groups.Thus, the sample relating to the first group amounted to 1348 students and that of the second group to 876 students.

The comparative analysis of these works was complex since the methodology, objectives and data analysis carried out for each of them was very heterogeneous. From an initial total of 42 papers found initially, the following inclusion criteria were applied to perform the meta-analysis

  • The interventions were based on full attention content .
  • The implementation of the program was carried out in the school.
  • The students belong to courses located between 1st and 12th grade .
  • The results presented were quantitative.

Following the application of these criteria, 24 of the 42 initial articles were selected. The components of which the interventions in the 24 finalist studies consisted mainly of breathing observation, psychoeducation and group discussions . The areas assessed as a whole were cognitive performance, emotional problems, stress and coping, and resilience.

Results

The results showed a strongly positive correlation in increase of academic performance ; moderately significant (although sufficiently significant) in resilience and decrease of stress; small but significant correlation in the resilience variable; and small and not significant for measures of emotional problems.

Thus, this review concludes that the greatest benefits occur in the area of cognitive domain although it also seems to influence (with less intensity) the level of stress, coping with adverse situations and recovery from them.

Assessment of study quality

With regard to the assessment of the scientific rigor indicated by the researchers, among the strengths of this review we can highlight the extent of the search for work carried out on this subject to date, the use of databases and the inclusion criteria have allowed an exhaustive and complete compilation of the existing publications up to the date of the start of the meta-analysis.

Finally, the text proposes the need to carry out interventions aimed at the teaching team in order to provide them with the necessary training on these contents and thus facilitate greater integration by the students receiving these Mindfulness programmes.

However, in reference to the limitations of the text, those responsible for the text recall the heterogeneity among the studies included in the review, so the results of the review should be taken as a guideline. Thus, the implementation and typology of specific contents of each of the interventions based on Mindfulness that have been carried out in each of the schools present insufficient uniformity, which makes a totally objective comparison difficult.

Finally, it is also noted that the samples that make up the studies reviewed are not very large , which means that the results are provisional and should be supported by further evaluation.

Full-care interventions with youth: a meta-analysis

In the work of Zoogman et al. (2014) it is the first to shed light on the review of studies published between 2004 and 2011 in which full care programmes have been implemented in populations within the life stage of youth (under 18 years of age).

Before presenting the results obtained, it is important to highlight the data provided in the introductory part of the text, since it summarizes the state of development of Mindfulness research in the child and/or youth population at a quantitative level. More specifically, the authors mention that there are very few studies that have taken experimental samples from subjects of adolescent age without a clinical diagnosis.

Thus, work that has attempted to test the effectiveness of full care in this age group has been based on groups with learning difficulties and various disorders.Furthermore, it is indicated that the age range most studied covers from preschool to secondary school, focusing on the school population .

On the other hand, the variables that have appeared most popularly in the publications analyzed refer to academic performance, social skills (Beauchemin et al. 2008), level of stress and anxiety (Liehr and Diaz 2010), depression (Mendelson et al., 2010), aggressive behavior (Singh et al. 2011a, b) and substance abuse (Bootzin and Stevens 2005; Britton et al. 2010).

Methodology

The texts were taken, in this case, from articles in an English-language magazine. After filtering the papers through some inclusion criteria, 20 investigations were selected, in which it was not possible to discriminate according to different sub-populations due to the scarcity of data collected to date. The objectives of this meta-analysis are aimed at evaluation:

  • What is the overall effect of youth-friendly interventions ?
  • What moderating factors of the treatment (structure, recipients, clinical/non-clinical sample, duration of treatment, frequency of sessions, etc.) are the most effective?
  • ¿ What results and what level of effectiveness has been obtained in the target sample (psychological symptoms, attention, general functioning of the individual) after the intervention through full attention?

Results

The results derived from the statistical data analysis procedures show that the full-care based interventions studied in the youth population present a small effect compared to the effectiveness of other alternative interventions , although they significantly exceed the effect of the control groups considered.

When clinical samples have been observed, the effect has been considered moderate and has tripled in magnitude in non-clinical samples. This seems to indicate that full attention may be particularly beneficial in clinical populations .

Only one variable was substantial and provided relevant results: clinical vs. non-clinical sample; the remaining variables such as frequency, duration, frequency of sessions, sample age, sample size, sample sex, etc., did not yield differential data. However, a substantial effect was found in the measures of the psychological symptoms presented, much greater than in other types of results such as attention or general functioning of the individual, etc.

However, the meta-analysis does affirm that meditation has specifically demonstrated its efficacy in the capacity of concentration in adolescents (for example Baijal et al., 2011 among many others), although in this review no great correlation has been found between both variables, as it has with respect to the clinical symptomatology variable. Even so, the low number of publications included in the meta-analysis and the heterogeneity of the same indicates that what has been found should be assessed with caution.

Bibliographic references:

  • Zenner, C., Herrnleben-Kurz S. and Walach, H. (2014). Mindfulness-based interventions in schools-a systematic review and meta-analyses. Institute for Transcultural Health Studies, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder (Germany). June 2014 | Volume 5 | Article 603, Frontiers in Psychology.
  • Zoogman, Goldberg S.B. Hoyt, W. T. & Miller, L. (2014) Mindfulness Interventions with Youth: A Meta-Analysis. Mindfulness, Springer Science (New York).