Changes in processing and early attention strategies in anxious individuals using mindfulness

Mindfulness is a skill used to create a nonjudgemental present awareness of a person's environment. Mindfulness is used as a component in several psychological treatment packages and in some theories attempting to explain the amelioration of psychological distress though the mechanisms of mindfulness are not well understood. The nonjudgmental awareness of a person's environment is incompatible with an anxious person's attentional strategy of finding dangerous elements in the environment and attempting to avoid them. Hypervigilance toward threat and subsequent avoidance has been observed across anxiety disorders and shown in the attentional strategies of anxious people. In the current study, high trait anxiety participants were expected to demonstrate such a pattern of sustained anxious attention to negative stimuli compared to average trait anxiety participants. However, high trait anxiety participants were expected to exhibit a greater reduction in sustained attention after completing a brief mindfulness exercise whereas a comparison relaxation exercise was not expected to alter attention. Measures of attention included pupil dilation, scan path analysis and reaction time. The study yielded little support for the hypotheses. Participants who completed the brief mindfulness exercise demonstrated a smaller degree of pupil arousal following negative stimuli compared to positive stimuli that was not observed in participants who completed the relaxation exercise. This reaction to mindfulness was noted in high trait anxiety participants, but was absent in normal trait anxiety participants. Analysis of picture viewing indicated no differences between participants who completed the mindfulness exercise and those completing relaxation training on time viewing negative stimuli in comparison to total viewing time of pictures or on visual exploration of negative stimuli in comparison to the visual exploration of the total viewing area. Similar results were observed between conditions in high trait anxiety participants. Reaction to the dot-probe task revealed no significant differences between participants who completed the brief mindfulness exercise and those who completed the relaxation exercise. Level of anxiety was not related to reaction time. Lack of support may have been due to subclinical levels of anxiety in the participant population. Inclusion of a control group would help determine if there was a global reduction in reactivity to negative stimuli stemming from both inductions.