Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: MARÍA LUCÍA ZABALA | Email: lu_zabala@live.com
MARÍA LUCÍA ZABALA1°3°, MARÍA JOSÉ AGUILAR1°2°3°, MARCELA CAROLINA LÓPEZ1°3°, MARÍA MARTA RICHARD´S1°2°3°
1° IPSIBAT (Instituto de Psicología Básica, Aplicada y Tecnología UNMDP-CONICET)
2° CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas)
3° Facultad de Psicología (Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata)
Mindfulness is the ability to attend to the present moment without judgment, with openness
and acceptance towards experience. Mindfulness-based intervention programs are the subject
of numerous studies that show strong evidence of their impact on mental health, stress
management and depression in clinical populations. Concurrently, another approach examines
the effects of mindfulness training programs aimed at children in educational contexts
evaluating their impact on academic and socio-emotional performance. This paper presents a
study that evaluated the impact of a mindfulness training program and its short- and long-term
transfer effects on social cognition and executive functioning in preschoolers. An experimental
design with an active control group was implemented in a sample of 90 preschoolers from public
and private institutions. Theory of mind, emotional recognition, cognitive flexibility and
inhibition were evaluated. Preliminary results for transfer effects on emotion recognition
revealed statistical significance in both within and between-subject contrasts (p=.03; p=.05),
indicating that the intervention improved this ability in preschoolers attending private
institutions, while no intervention effects were found in public schools. It is hypothesized that
the context of program implementation—systematicity, disposition and resources—as well as
the socio-educational level of the participants might influence the effectiveness of such
programs.