Brief breath awareness training yields poorer working memory performance in the context of acute stress

ABSTRACT

Mindfulness-based interventions that span multiple sessions over time appear to confer psychological benefits. However, the effects of brief periods of mindfulness meditation training are less clear, particularly on measures of cognitive functioning. This study assessed whether brief mindfulness practice (breath awareness) or training in two other contemplative practices – loving-kindness and gratitude – differentially impact working memory performance following acute physiological stress relative to an attentional control. Participants (n = 162) were randomly assigned to one of four training groups and completed the automated Operation Span (OSPAN) task pre-training and again after undergoing the cold pressor task. Three of the four groups improved in OSPAN performance, with loving-kindness, gratitude, and attentional control conditions showing increases in OSPAN relative to breath awareness. Changes in OSPAN were not correlated with changes in positive or negative affect. It appears that brief breath awareness training may not effectively buffer against acute stress in this predominantly meditation naïve sample and may in fact impair subsequent cognitive performance relative to a control or other contemplative practices. A granular approach is warranted to understand potentially distinct and contextually variable effects of different contemplative practices. Implications are discussed in light of the stress buffering hypothesis and Monitor and Acceptance Theory.

Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02214264.

KEYWORDS:

• Mindfulness
• gratitude
• loving-kindness
• working memory
• stress

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available through the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/hpcmk/

Acknowledgements

We thank Rachel Koszalinski for her help in managing the study and all of the undergraduate research assistants involved in data collection. We thank David Findley for his contributions to conceptualising this study and overseeing the project management. Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Center for Complementary & Integrative Health of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number K23AT010879 (S. B. Goldberg) and P01AT004952 (R. J. Davidson).

Declaration of interest

R. J. Davidson is the founder, president, and serves on the board of directors for the nonprofit organisation Healthy Minds Innovations, Inc. The remaining authors declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.

Notes

1 Although some forms of breath awareness meditation are more focused in orientation (e.g., jhana practice; Dahl et al., 2015), we used a guided practice that is very similar to that provided as a foundational technique in mindfulness-based interventions like mindfulness-based stress reduction. This practice involves some degree of open monitoring of experiences that occur in tandem with the breath (e.g., thoughts, emotions), although the individual is still encouraged to return to the breath as a central object when the mind has wandered. For a transcript of the practices, see Hirshberg et al. (2018).

2 A reviewer raised the intriguing possibility that reduced working memory performance may be adaptive within the context of an acute stressor in which initiation of behavior (i.e., action) may be preferred to internal processing (i.e., cognition). Thus, increased working memory seen for the loving-kindness, gratitude, and control condition may inhibit adaptive responding to an external threat. It would be worthwhile investigating the differential effects of brief training on measures designed to index other potentially adaptive responses to acute stress (e.g., inhibitory control, set shifting).

Additional information

Funding

We thank Rachel Koszalinski for her help in managing the study and all of the undergraduate research assistants involved in data collection. We thank David Findley for his contributions to conceptualising this study and overseeing the project management. Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Center for Complementary & Integrative Health of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number K23AT010879 (S. B. Goldberg) and P01AT004952 (R. J. Davidson).