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College can be a time of immense stress. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to be an effective stress management technique. A significant limitation of the mindfulness literature, however, is a reliance on inactive control groups. We compared a mindfulness intervention with both an ecologically valid, active control (interacting with a dog during a group study break) and a no-treatment control. Participants (n = 74) were randomly assigned to groups, with the treatment groups completing 4 weekly sessions (duration: 1 hr). By the end of the 4th session, those in the mindfulness group exhibited significantly lower state anxiety compared with those in the other groups, while the dog group was also significantly less anxious than the control group. In addition, both the dog and the mindfulness groups exhibited significantly less dysphoric affect than the control group. All of the participants came in for a posttreatment assessment during which they were given a cognitive stressor challenge. Electrocardiogram data were collected during the cognitive challenge allowing us to assess heart rate variability (HRV)—a measure of the body’s ability to modulate the physiological stress response. Participants in the mindfulness group exhibited significantly higher HRV during the cognitive challenge than those in the other 2 groups, signifying a more-adaptive response to stress (p < .05). Individuals in the dog group, meanwhile, were no different from control participants. These preliminary findings suggest that brief mindfulness training can help college students manage their stress in response to the ubiquitous academic and cognitive challenges of college life.
Land systems are the result of human interactions with the natural environment. Understanding the drivers, state, trends and impacts of different land systems on social and natural processes helps to reveal how changes in the land system affect the functioning of the socio-ecological system as a whole and the tradeoff these changes may represent. The Global Land Project has led advances by synthesizing land systems research across different scales and providing concepts to further understand the feedbacks between social-and environmental systems, between urban and rural environments and between distant world regions. Land system science has moved from a focus on observation of change and understanding the drivers of these changes to a focus on using this understanding to design sustainable transformations through stakeholder engagement and through the concept of land governance. As land use can be seen as the largest geo-engineering project in which mankind has engaged, land system science can act as a platform for integration of insights from different disciplines and for translation of knowledge into action.