Article archive / September 1, 2013
Originally published: . Volume 5, No. 1. Source pages: 10.
My good friends John Pickering and Yael Banai have graciously agreed to comment this month. John is becoming the state expert on mindfulness and a real resource for us. Yael, commenting for us on the impact of stereotyping on test scores, has flown the coop. She’s off to Alaska but thanks to modern telecommuting, I have hardly noticed.
• How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective. Holzel, et al, – Perspectives on Psychological Science, November 2011.
The authors point out that mindfulness mediation has increasingly become part of therapy, for anxiety, depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, or chronic pain. Here, they offer a framework that attempts to explain how these mindfulness interventions work, from a conceptual and neural perspective.
COMMENT: John W. Pickering, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in private practice in Baton Rouge, serves on the teaching faculty of the Southern Louisiana (Psychology) Internship Consortium and the LSU-Our Lady Of the Lake Psychiatric Residency Program. Over the past four years, he has been a co-presenter of “A Day of Mindfulness for Mental Health Professionals,” held annually at the Tam Bao Meditation Hall in Baton Rouge.
“This article provides a good review of research efforts in the newly emerging field of mindfulness meditation, and makes a very fruitful attempt to provide a neurally-based theoretical framework to synthesize and explicate the research findings. A practice to increase self-knowledge and reduce suffering, mindfulness meditation has been emphasized in Buddhist teachings for the past 2 ½ millennia; however only within the last 30 years has it been systematically incorporated into psychotherapy interventions and subjected to rigorous scientific investigation, usually by mental health professionals (e.g., Jon Kabat- Zinn, Marsha Linehan, Steven Hayes) who have studied many years under zen or other Buddhist masters. The authors delineate four components through which research studies have suggested that mindfulness meditation exerts its effects: attention regulation, body awareness, emotional regulation and change in perspective on the self, and they describe how these components may interact and mutually facilitate one another in producing the effects observed. This is the first attempt I am aware of to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena, and thus it should be regarded as quite tentative and almost certainly subject to revision, however it provides a cohesive framework that will likely be very helpful in guiding future research efforts and will provide a helpful introduction for anyone who has an interest in this subject.”
• Latent Ability: Grades and Test Scores Systematically Underestimate the Intellectual Ability of Negatively Stereotyped Students. Walton and Spencer, – Psychological Science, September 2009.
Walton and Spencer from Stanford and U. of Waterloo look into important considerations to test validity. They suggest that a bias is present with non- Asian ethic minorities and with women in quantitative fields. In this article they test their hypothesis by combining data from 18,976 students in five countries. They found that under conditions of reduced psychological threat, the stereotyped students performed better than nonstereotyped students at the same level of past performance.
COMMENT: Yael Banai, PhD, South East Regional Resource Center, Juneau, Alaska. Employed by the Ascension Parish School Board where she had been a practicing school psychologist for the last 21 years, Dr. Banai recently retired from APSB and took on school psychology duties whit the South East Regional Resource Center in Juneau, Alaska. Based in Anchorage, Banai will provide services to outlying communities throughout Alaska. She has been active in the Louisiana School Psychological Association, and is currently past president.
“Possibly one of the most controversial issues in psychology and education is large group differences in academic and intellectual performance. This article specifically deals with bias resulting from psychological threat which is embedded in the environment, despite our best efforts to overtly remove it (such as situating students in an egalitarian setting, using culturally non-biased language, etc.). This stereotype threat resides in the individual’s worry that a poor performance might give credence to the prevailing stereotype for his particular group (non-Asian minorities and women). Though Walton and Spencer have provided important information about the dimensions of the problem, for this practically oriented psychologist, they are short on solutions, other than to suggest “scaling up” threat reducing interventions “to improve performance in mass”.
*** The “Psychology Gumbo” is for linking science, practice, and people in the Louisiana psychology and behavioral science community. If you have a topic to share with the Times’ readers, please contact me at psychologytimes@drjulienelson.com. I’d like to have you in the stew.
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