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ABSTRACT
Considerable research has now documented the beneficial effects of mindfulness-based practices on psychological functioning. Less is known about the long-term durability of such changes following formal meditation training. In a sample of adults (N = 67, 52% female, ages 22–70 years), we examined changes in 16 measures of psychological adaptive functioning across a 3-month residential meditation intervention and across a subsequent 7-year period. We observed general training-related improvements followed by multi-year returns toward pre-training levels. However, beneficial changes in two personality attributes (agreeableness and neuroticism) were of moderate effect size (d = 0.51 and d = 0.45, respectively) and were retained across the 7-year follow-up. We further found that individual variation in changes was represented by three latent attributes: (Changes related to) Mindful Well-being, Resilient Extraversion, and Self-Compassionate Openness. These results suggest that intensive meditation training is associated with improved adaptive functioning and enduring changes in aspects of personality.
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the Fetzer Institute (Grant 2191) and John Templeton Foundations (Grant 39970); the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies; and gifts from the Hershey Family, the Baumann, Tan Teo, Yoga Science, and Mental Insight Foundations, and anonymous and other donors all to Clifford Saron. We are grateful to David Bridwell, Tonya Jacobs, Katherine MacLean, Quinn Conklin, and B. Alan Wallace for their many contributions to the study.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data and statistical code availability
De-identified participant data and statistical code for the study are provided as Supplemental Materials (S2, S3), which can be accessed directly at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GTCPUN.
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2024.2378700.
Open scholarship
This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/GTCPUN.
Notes
1. Several applicants were meditation novices but were provisionally accepted into the study on the condition that they completed these preliminary retreats prior to the beginning of the 3-month intervention about 1 year later.
2. As described in Sahdra et al. (Citation2011), we administered only two questionnaire measures at the beginning of Retreat 2: the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) and the Ego Resiliency Scale. We therefore used the waitlist-control participants’ data from the end of Retreat 1 as a proxy for their Retreat 2 pre-retreat (T1) data.
3. Given low internal consistency for this scale, we caution against strong interpretations of results for this outcome. Nevertheless, we report results for CESD scores, in line with our prior report (i.e. Sahdra et al., Citation2011).
4. Sensitivity analyses included MLM and regression models applied to data from only the original experimentally assigned participants. These are reported as Supplemental Materials (S4). The results were nearly identical to those from analyses that included volunteer participants. We also conducted a post hoc power analysis using G*Power software (Faul et al., Citation2007) based on the observed sample size at the 7-year follow-up (N = 46), α = 0.05 (two-tailed), and a medium effect size (d = .5). Our effective power was β = 0.97.
5. Depressive symptoms were low at the pre-training assessment, providing little room for decreases with training.