First Name:
Alexandra
Last Name:
Mentus
Major Department:
Psychology
Thesis Director:
Lisa Emery
Date of Thesis:
May 2011
Mindfulness is the broad attentiveness and lack of hierarchal evaluation -given to internal and external stimuli. Previous studies have shown a wide range of benefits of mindfulness, including improved mental and physical health and improved control of attention. These benefits ofmindfulness may be interrelated, in that improved controlled attention may influence what kinds ofdetails people focus on in emotional situations. For example, the emotional memory trade-offis the effect ofthe narrowing attention away from peripheral (non-emotional) details of a situation and onto central (usually negative) details, the magnitude of which was measured in relation to trait mindfulness. Participants viewed a set ofemotional photographs and then were asked to recognize those same images later among sets that contained the original and a look- alike that had either a central or peripheral change. The results suggest that high scores in two facets of mindfulness, observing and nonjudging, influenced the size of the emotional memory trade-off, but in slightly different ways. The results suggest that the relationships between the individual facets of mindfulness and their effects on attentional processes associated with emotion are not as consistent as believed and may occasionally be negative.