- Thank you, thank you so much
and thank you for the presentation,
it's an honor to be here and to hear
all of your wealth of knowledge.
My question here is, I fell in love with mindfulness
and I've decided to go back and get a PhD,
so I'm currently trying to put together a dissertation.
And what I've noticed in trying to put together
this research study is I can't find a lot of information
about attention control arms
for mindfulness-based interventions.
And so, in your opinion, when trying to put together
a quantitative study, using MBSR gold standard,
as an eight week intervention,
should I also control an attention control arm,
or just try to include a normal control arm
in the intervention?
- So, I appreciate the question,
and for the others, let me just sort of step back
and clarify why this is an important question
and sort of what's riding on the question.
In terms of the research, if you compare a meditation group
to a control group that doesn't get anything,
then it may be that any changes that you see
are not due to the meditation itself.
It may be simply the fact that these are people
who are being attended to more, cared for me,
there's more interest being expressed in them.
Those are all kind of what we call non-specific factors,
which can lead to improvement in and of itself.
It's kind of like a placebo effect.
And so, if you want to say that any of the changes
that you see are definitively due
to the practices themselves, then you have to do
other kinds of control conditions.
And you know, doing that, it's not for the faint hearted.
They're not easy to implement.
They're also expensive.
And so, it's one of the reasons they haven't
been done so much, it's hard, it's really hard.
We've developed a control condition
for mindfulness-based stress reduction
that we call The Health Enhancement Program,
which matches MBSR in every structural way.
There are classes that meet every week
for the same amount of time, the same amount
of practice homework is requested.
We've actually matched the level of enthusiasm
of the teachers, and their confidence in believing
that what they're teaching will promote wellbeing,
which is really important.
So, we've gone to great lengths,
but doing that is really not easy,
and it requires a lot to do.
And most people don't have the resources to do that.
And so, I would say do whatever it is that you could do,
I'm sure it will be of some benefit.
And at the very least what you should do
is what we call a waitlist control,
which is have people sign up for MBSR,
or if that's the condition you're using,
and randomly assign them to MBSR,
or to a group that you call a waitlist control,
where they're told that they'll get the MBSR,
but they'll get it at some point
delayed by six months, or a year.
And that way, at least, you match the selection bias,
because all of the people are interested
in practicing meditation to begin with.
So, that's something that I would encourage you to do
which is not that difficult.