Meditation Program Enhances Teachers’ Emotional Lives
A new study that began with a meeting with the Dalai Lama shows that an intensive program of meditation can help schoolteachers become more calm and compassionate.
The University of California – San Francisco (UCSF) study blended ancient meditation practices with the most current scientific methods for regulating emotions.
Researchers found that schoolteachers who underwent a short but intensive program of meditation were less depressed, anxious or stressed – and more compassionate and aware of others’ feelings.
Meditation is a technique that has been practices for thousands of years and is a core feature of many spiritual traditions. Millions of individuals around the world use the technique as well to mitigate psychological problems, improve self-awareness and clear the mind.
Over the years, research has focused on physical outcomes related to meditation such as positive changes in blood pressure, metabolism and pain. However, less is known about the specific emotional changes that result from the practice.
The new study was designed to create new techniques to reduce destructive emotions while improving social and emotional behavior.
The study will be published in the April issue of the journal Emotion.
“The findings suggest that increased awareness of mental processes can influence emotional behavior,” said lead author Margaret Kemeny, Ph.D., director of the Health Psychology Program in UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry.
“The study is particularly important because opportunities for reflection and contemplation seem to be fading in our fast-paced, technology-driven culture.”
Altogether, 82 female schoolteachers between the ages of 25 and 60 participated in the project. Teachers were chosen because their work is stressful and because the meditation skills they learned could be immediately useful to their daily lives, possibly trickling down to benefit their students.
The ultimate goal of researchers was to answer a question posed by the Dalai Lama at a meeting between Buddhist scholars, behavioral scientists and emotion experts. At the meeting the experts pondered the topic of emotions, leading the Dalai Lama to pose a question: In the modern world, would a secular version of Buddhist contemplation reduce harmful emotions?
From that, psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace developed a 42-hour, eight-week training program, integrating secular meditation practices with techniques learned from the scientific study of emotion. It incorporated three categories of meditative practice:
- Concentration practices involving sustained, focused attention on a specific mental or sensory experience;
- Mindfulness practices involving the close examination of one’s body and feelings;
- Directive practices designed to promote empathy and compassion toward others.
In the randomized, controlled trial, the schoolteachers learned to better understand the relationship between emotion and cognition, and to better recognize emotions in others and their own emotional patterns so they could better resolve difficult problems in their relationships.
All the teachers were new to meditation and all were involved in an intimate relationship.
“We wanted to test whether the intervention affected both personal well-being as well as behavior that would affect the well-being of their intimate partners,” said Kemeny.
As a test, the teachers and their partners underwent a “marital interaction” task measuring minute changes in facial expression while they attempted to resolve a problem in their relationship. In this type of encounter, those who express certain negative facial expressions are more likely to divorce, research has shown.
Some of the teachers’ key facial movements during the marital interaction task changed, particularly hostile looks which diminished. In addition, depressed mood levels dropped by more than half. In a follow-up assessment five months later, many of the positive changes remained, the authors said.
“We know much less about longer-term changes that occur as a result of meditation, particularly once the ‘glow’ of the experience wears off,” Kemeny said.
“It’s important to know what they are because these changes probably play an important role in the longer-term effects of meditation on mental and physical health symptoms and conditions.”
Nauert PhD, R. (2018). Meditation Program Enhances Teachers’ Emotional Lives. Psych Central. Retrieved on July 2, 2020, from https://psychcentral.com/news/2012/03/29/meditation-program-enhances-teachers-emotional-lives/36685.html