Harvard Medical School (HMS), Department of Health Care Policy, USA; National University of Singapore (NUS), Department of Psychology, USA. Electronic address: nhzainal@hcp.med.harvard.edu.
2 papers in the library · 13 citations · publishing 2024-2025
A 14-day mindfulness ecological momentary intervention (MEMI) for social anxiety disorder was compared with a self-monitoring app in a randomized trial with 191 participants. The MEMI produced small but statistically significant improvements in momentary depression, anxiety, and mindfulness. However, no between-group differences were found for social anxiety symptoms, worry, depression severity, repetitive negative thinking, or trait mindfulness at post-intervention or one-month follow-up. Within the MEMI group, depression severity decreased significantly, while the self-monitoring group showed no such reduction. The findings suggest that brief MEMI may offer limited added benefit over self-monitoring for social anxiety disorder but could have value in stepped-care settings.
A proof-of-concept study with 40 high-worry adults (80% with an anxiety disorder) tested whether features of worry predict which cognitive strategy works best to regulate it. Participants rated their worries on five dimensions and tried mindful acceptance, focused attention meditation, or thought suppression during brain scanning. The preregistered hypotheses were not supported, but exploratory analyses showed that mindfulness-based strategies were more effective than thought suppression for worries rated as more uncontrollable. The authors call for larger studies with more varied perseverative thoughts.