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We investigated whether three different meditation practices that are commonly used in mindfulness-based interventions lead to differential changes in psychological health outcomes when presented separately. Participants included 141 undergraduates assigned to a sitting meditation, body scan, or mindful yoga condition. Participants in all conditions attended three weekly 1-h sessions (105 min of guided meditation and 75 min of discussion) in addition to pre- and post-intervention questionnaires collected in separate sessions. Participants reported significant improvements in the tendency to describe one’s experience, rumination, self-compassion, and psychological well-being regardless of condition. The following between-group differences in change over time emerged: (1) mindful yoga was associated with greater increases in psychological well-being than the other two practices, (2) sitting meditation and mindful yoga were both associated with greater decreases in difficulties with emotion regulation than the body scan, and (3) sitting meditation was associated with greater increases in the tendency to take a nonevaluative stance toward observed stimuli than the body scan.
Although self-report measures of dispositional mindfulness have good psychometric properties, a few studies have shown unexpected positive correlations between substance use and mindfulness scales measuring observation of present-moment experience. The current study tested the hypothesis that the relationship between present-moment observation and substance use is moderated by the tendency to be nonjudgmental and nonreactive toward the observed stimuli. Two hundred and ninety-six undergraduates completed the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), a calendar measuring periods of substance use, and a measure of the Five-Factor Model of personality. Controlling for FFMQ and personality subscales, significant interactions between the observing and nonreactivity subscales indicated that the observing subscale was negatively associated with substance use at higher levels of nonreactivity but positively associated with periods of substance use at lower levels of nonreactivity. Results support the use of statistical interactions among FFMQ subscales to test for the presence of interactive effects of different aspects of mindfulness.