Listen, the talk show’s over – so mind how you go

It was not exactly incriminating evidence, but the photographs of the eminent Penn State academic Mark Greenberg sharing a joke with the Dalai Lama at last year’s Seeeds of Compassion conference in Seattle probably raised a few eyebrows at the Enlightenment Club.

“Good man, that Greenberg. But, mark my words, next thing he’ll be climbing in the Himalayas. No way back from there, I’m afraid.”

Greenberg’s prevention science discipline is well known for its capacity to aid the healthy “re-wiring” of children’s developing brains, but perhaps not yet for standardized yoga or breathing exercises.

But, if using evidence to reduce violence is the bread and butter of Society for Prevention Research members, should they not also be investigating strategies for feeding compassion?

At one of the final symposia at last week's conference in Washington DC a meditation on the subject of "mindfulness" exemplified the point.

To the Buddhist, mindfulness refers to calm self awareness. It is the body's understanding of itself. To a Western psychologist, mindfulness might suggest more simply our ability to grasp what is happening around us and to tune our emotions so that we can be curious, open and accepting of the world we encounter. Mindfulness is seeing the world as it is.

More troublesome to the enthusiastic social improver, mindfulness as "bare attention" can be at odds with the diagnostics of poverty or material well-being. Such “affect states” are neither pleasant or unpleasant, neither to be accepted nor rejected – they are merely mental events.

Nevertheless, by scientists such as Daniel Goleman and Jacquelynne Eccles, a version of mindfulness is considered fundamental to the healthy development of children. They have joined with the Dalai Lama and others to form The Mind and Life Institute [1], which is exploring research partnerships combining science and Buddhism.

Their goal is nothing less than to educate people across the planet to be compassionate, competent, ethical, and engaged citizens.

The reason mindfulness made it on to the Society for Prevention Research agenda, last week, albeit rather late in the proceedings, is that these cross-cutting ideas are beginning to be tested in practice.

The Holistic Life Foundation, for example, delivers mindfulness-based techniques to urban youth. Fourth and fifth grade kids get a 12-week stress reduction program four days a week, and, with it, an introduction to yoga and breathing exercises.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Prevention Research Center at Penn State University have evaluated the program in four schools.

In the two schools where students were randomly allocated to the program, they found that they “ruminated less”. They experienced fewer intrusive thoughts, showed greater acceptance of others and regulated their emotions more successfully. The evaluators reported effect sizes ranged from 0.5 to 0.7.

As the Washington conference presenters themselves were the first to admit, the research methodology doesn’t bear much close scrutiny. So far, samples have been small and the evaluations have lacked power. The results showed that mindfulness could be enhanced in the moment it was being studied, but as yet there is nothing to indicate any impact on children’s longer term development.

But the interest in collecting such rudimentary data all the same signals a clear intention on the part of mindfulness researchers to bridge the divide between profound qualitative experience and solid scientific accounting. 

Speaking at the symposium, Mark Greenberg stressed how great was the the distance that still separated this preliminary investigation from a fully operationalized prevention program. More conceptual work had to be done; the detail of any intervention had still to be worked out. Little was known about dosage or frequency or any of the more familiar attributes of a fit-for-purpose product.

He talked also about the enormous value of listening – how important it was for students and colleagues to give each other their complete, open, curious and accepting attention.