Guided mindfulness meditation as facilitated by the Headspace smartphone application: potential relationships with the mind of higher education students

Abstract

This study researched to what extent a smartphone application-based guided mindfulness meditation practice could be related to aspects of the mind of higher education students, such as metacognition, adaptive expertise, meditative experiences and reflection, personality and subjective well-being. Seven students at Utrecht University were recruited and assigned to either an experimental group, characterized by a three week intervention period with the Headspace app for guided mindfulness meditation, or to a control group with no intervention in this period. Both groups filled in online self-report questionnaires related to the aforementioned aspects of the mind as part of a pre- and post-test. The results showed no significant difference scores of the pre- and post-tests. However, correlation analysis revealed multiple significant positive and negative correlations between the research constructs. The exposure of these correlations could help to create a better insight into the way these specific aspects of the mind relate with each other within a larger network. The consequential more comprehensive understanding could potentially have positive implications for the scientific field of cognitive and neurobiological psychology, as well as in a therapeutic and educational context. With the current digital age, society’s increasing demand for flexibility and intricate cognitive skills, and with higher education students being important future (leading) figures, further research within the combination of themes of the current study is encouraged.