Mindfulness May Help You See the Bright Side

Source: iStock image by cagkansayin licensed to Art Markman

Over the last decade, there has been a growing body of research on the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation techniques in calming stress and anxiety. With training, people can become more adept at recognizing thoughts that trigger anxiety and can work on allowing those thoughts to happen without reacting to them emotionally, which can help prevent stress from escalating when having a thought about a negative event.

Another way that stress can be maintained is that feeling stressed and anxious can cause you to interpret things in the world in a way that maintains your stress level, even though they need not signal anything bad. Consider facial expressions. Some are clearly negative. If a person displays anger to you, then clearly they are feeling bad. But, what if you see a person with a surprised expression? They might have seen something unexpected that they did not like, but they might have also received a gift out of the blue. So, a look of surprise could signal something positive or something negative.

There is some evidence that people react initially to ambiguous emotions like surprise as if they were negative, but then recognize that they can also be positive. If you are stressed, then you probably won’t get to the point where you see the potential positive side of emotions like this. If so, then you’ll be walking around the world interpreting the things around you negatively in ways that may also sustain your stress.

Mindfulness changes the way we interpret ambiguous information

An interesting paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in 2022 by Nicholas Harp, Jonathan Freeman, and Maital Neta explored whether mindfulness training could change the way people interpret ambiguous information like surprise.

They ran a sample of people through an eight-week intensive mindfulness training program. Participants were asked to respond to ambiguous material that was divided into two groups—one that should be influenced by mindfulness training and one that should not. The researchers asked the participants to state whether particular facial expressions were expressing positive or negative emotion. Some options were clearly positive (happiness) and some were clearly negative (anger). The rest were faces showing an ambiguous emotion (surprise). The other task involved saying whether a color was better categorized as red or blue, where some of the items were ambiguous (purple). People did these tasks before the mindfulness intervention began, a few times during the intervention, and then again eight weeks after the intervention ended.

As you might expect, mindfulness training had no impact on judgments of color, but there was an interesting pattern for judgments of facial expression. People were quite good at categorizing the positive and negative faces at all phases of the study. Before the mindfulness intervention, people had a bias to categorize the surprised faces as negative. Over the course of the study (and continuing at the eight-week follow-up), participants categorized a higher proportion of the ambiguous expressions as positive.

In the last session, participants also filled out the Five Facets of Mindfulness Questionnaire, which asks about a variety of elements of mindfulness, including the ability to describe our own thoughts, refrain from self-judgment based on our thoughts, and avoid reacting to thoughts. This last facet of non-reactivity was related to people’s judgments of faces. The more that people were skilled at avoiding reactions to thoughts, the more likely they were to overcome the bias to categorize surprised faces as negative and to see them as positive instead.

To demonstrate that this effect was specific to mindfulness training and not a result of doing the task several times, the performance of these participants was compared to that of other participants who did the same facial judgment task several times over the course of unrelated long-term studies. The results from these participants found no significant changes in people's tendency to classify ambiguous facial expressions as positive.

This research helps to illuminate a mechanism that can allow mindfulness training to have a long-term impact on stress and anxiety. The better people become at interpreting the world in a positive light, the more they will interpret ambiguous information as evidence of positive aspects of the world rather than as negative ones. If the world looks like it has more positivity than negativity, that creates conditions for joy and happiness rather than stress and anxiety.