Practicing mindfulness-based meditation could help the individual to make more optimistic attributions because meditation allows practitioners to overcome their negative thoughts and emotions, and get a more realistic perspective on the issues. Thus the practitioners establish a higher sense of control over their cognitive, behavioral and affective experiences; and have high capabilities to deal with the problems. To sum up, mindfulness-based meditation interventions make practitioners improve their self-efficacy (20,21,22,23).

Mindfulness meditation may be a beneficial intervention to foster self-control under low resources, including the crucial components of self-control like emotion regulation and attention regulation (24,25,26). To give an example study, participants who have had a 9-min focused breathing exercise showed less spider-avoiding behavior compared to the control group (27).

Self-reported mindfulness is related to self-reported empathy and self-reported helping behavior (28,29). It also activates the brain regions responsible for empathy (30). It was stated that mindful awareness helps the practitioners to understand the emotional processes in general thus they are getting able to better understand others’ emotional processes (31).

Some studies have indicated the positive relationship between meditation and happiness as well as lower levels of depression, anxiety, hostility, and dysphoria (32,33). The meditation-based intervention has kept continuing to increase the level of happiness even after the intervention ended (34). Additionally, optimism and positive judgments increase via meditation practices because optimism is related to greater well-being (35,36).

REFERENCES

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22. Astin, J. A. (1997). Stress reduction through mindfulness meditation: Effects on psychological symptomatology, sense of control, and spiritual experiences. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 66, 97-106
23. Feldman, G., Hayes, A., Kumar, S., Greeson, J., & Laurenceau, J.-P. (2007). Mindfulness and emotion regulation: The development and initial validation of the Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale-Revised (CAMSR). Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 29(3), 177-190.
24. Brown, K. W., & Ryan, R. M. (2003). The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 822-848.
25. Hodgins, H. S., & Adair, K. C. (2010). Attentional processes and meditation. Consciousness and Cognition, 872-878.
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27. Hooper, N., Davies, N., Davies, L., & McHugh, L. (2011). Comparing thought suppression and mindfulness as coping techniques for spider fear. Consciousness and Cognition, 20, 1824-1830.
28. Beitel, M., Ferrer, E., & Cecero, J. J. (2005). Psychological mindedness and awareness of self and others. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 61, 739-750.
29. Cameron, C. D., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2015). Mindfulness facets predict helping behavior and distinct helping-related emotions. Mindfulness, 6, 1211-1218.
30. Chiesa, A., & Serretti, A. (2010). A systematic review of neurobiological and clinical features of mindfulness meditations. Psychological Medicine, 40, 1239-1252
31. Salzberg, S. (2011). Mindfulness and loving-kindness. Contemporary Buddhism, 12, 177-182.
32. Beauchamp-Turner, D. L., & Levinson, D. M. (1992). Effects of meditation on stress, health, and affect. Medical Psychotherapy: An International Journal, 5, 123-131.
33. Jazaieri, H., McGonigal, K. M., Jinpa, T. G., Doty, J. R., Gross, J. J., & Goldin, P. R. (2014). A randomized controlled trial of Compassion Cultivation Training: Effects on mindfulness, affect, and emotion regulation. Motivation and Emotion, 38, 23-35.
34. Fredrickson, B. L., Cohn, M. A., Coffey, K. A., Pek, J., & Finkel, S. M. (2008). Open hearts build lives: Positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1045-1062.
35. Carver, C. S., Scheier, M. F., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2010). Optimism. Clinical Psychology Review, 30, 879-889.
36. Kiken, L. G., & Shook, N. J. (2011). Looking up: Mindfulness increases positive judgments and reduces negativity bias. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2, 425-431.