In collaboration with Oxford Mindfulness, Yiran Ge from the University of Oxford’s Emotion and Social Relations Research Group will start studies on mindfulness and its effects on daily emotion management and prosocial behaviours. In this blog post, Yiran discusses her current project and how mindfulness may impact our emotional and social well-being.
When things happen in life, we often get swamped with emotions and thoughts before we even know what hits us. You might find yourself asking, ‘How can I handle this situation?’ Or ‘Why do I keep thinking about it all the time?’
We often want to hit the brakes on this train of thoughts before it goes too far. One way to manage emotions at their early stages involves regulating our attention. We consider mindfulness to be a helpful practice as a key factor in mindfulness is being aware and open to present experience, without posing judgements on ourselves and others (Kabat-Zinn, 2003).
By extending this practice as we go about our busy life, there may be gradual changes in how we view what’s happening around us. Along with the Oxford Mindfulness’ Mindfulness for Life Course, we hope to enhance understanding of emotional experiences and social behaviours with more evidence from current research.
The power of beliefs about emotions
If managing emotions early on is useful for handling daily feelings and unexpected situations, why don’t we all do it more often? And why do we still get stuck with certain feelings or situations?
One idea might be that our beliefs about emotions affect how we deal with them. Studies over the past decade show that if you believe that emotions can be controlled and changed, you are more likely to make attempts to manage and regulate the way you feel (Kneeland, Goodman and Dovidio, 2020). This belief, known as the “incremental belief,” encourages people to use certain cognitive strategies to handle emotions early on when they have more capacity for coping, leading to better emotional health and well-being. Dealing with the situations that cause you to experience unpleasant feelings, distracting yourself, and thinking about how to see what is happening in a more positive light, are common examples.
On the other hand, if people view emotions as fixed and uncontrollable, they are more likely to focus their coping efforts on suppressing feelings and expressions that are already getting overwhelming, which may bring unhealthy consequences in the long run.
Mindfulness as a key support mechanism
Existing findings from research show that mindfulness-based training can help people better manage their emotions. Whether through guided sessions or by taking a few moments for informal meditation each day, mindfulness skills can help shape awareness to emotions. But mindfulness is more than just being aware – it’s about noticing the physical sensations that accompany emotions. This can help you create some breathing space between yourself and your feelings. By doing this, you may step back and look at your emotions more objectively, almost like an observer.
Mindfulness practice has also proved to be an effective way to relieve stress and improve psychological functioning in both clinical and non-clinical samples (Goldberg et al., 2018). Participants in mindfulness programmes report less use of alcohol and drugs, possibly because they develop a better sense of control over, and acceptance of, their negative emotions (Teper et al., 2013). We plan to extend our understanding and these findings by investigating the cognitive processes behind emotion management following mindfulness training. By exploring the link between flexible emotion beliefs and regulatory strategies, we hope to uncover how mindfulness facilitates changes on emotion regulation and to assess whether these changes persist after the course ends.
Mindfulness and your social relations
Another important focus of our research is looking at how mindfulness training affects our prosocial engagement, which is the tendency to do things that are intended to benefit other people (Habashi, Graziano and Hoover, 2016). Behaviours like helping, comforting and sharing are all considered to be prosocial behaviours. We hypothesise that mindfulness skills might play a role here too. One reason for this connection is that being less biased and judgmental might increase our sensitivity to moral issues (Sevinc and Lazar, 2019). We are curious to see if managing your attention and emotional state through mindfulness can extend to being more attuned to others in social environments.
Join our research
Mindfulness skills hold great promise for improving our emotional and social well-being. By understanding the role of beliefs about emotion in mindfulness practice, we can potentially better regulate our emotions, reduce stress and live healthier lives.
We are inviting interested people who intend to begin an eight-week Mindfulness for life course to join our study.
The study will be a longitudinal investigation that follows the progress of your course. Before starting and throughout the course, you will receive links to a brief online survey that includes questions about emotional beliefs, emotion regulation strategies, and social interactions.
If this sounds interesting, and you would like to get more information about the study, please visit the survey.
Stay tuned for more insights from our ongoing research. We are excited to share what we find!
