Modern therapies based on mindfulness and mindfulness principles have been used in a range of disorders, including schizophrenia, to help alleviate symptoms. However, we don’t know how mindfulness achieves these effects. This poster examined data from people with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and healthy controls to see how mindfulness affects how emotions change over time.
Our participants completed surveys up to eight times a day per day for six days on their emotions and mindfulness in the moment (called EMA). These surveys were then used to create mathematical models of how positive and negative emotions change over time at different levels of mindfulness.
We found that not only did mindfulness predict increasing positive emotion and decreasing negative emotion in both groups, but that this was associated with symptoms in the schizophrenia spectrum group!
This is an exciting line of research and will hopefully inform future research and clinical work.
Want to read more? Download the poster and analyses here!
I am hugely grateful for the co-authors, especially Ishika Chakrabarty and Dr. Hiroki Sayama from SUNY Binghamton, who conducted the mathematical modeling, my supervisor Dr. Gregory Strauss for providing valuable guidance in writing the poster and conducting the analyses, and Hannah Chapman and Cristina Gonzalez for their help with data collection and editing the poster.
This research was also made possible due to funding from the NIMH and the many participants who gave us so much of their time.
Citation: Raugh, I.M., Chakrabarty, I., Sayama, H., Chapman, H.C., Gonzalez, C.M., Strauss, G.P. (2019, September). Mathematically modeling the effects of mindfulness on emotional experience in schizophrenia. Poster presented at the Society for Research in Psychopathology Annual Meeting in Buffalo, NY.
Ian M. Raugh 