Training novice practitioners to reliably report their meditation experience using shared phenomenological dimensions.

A meditation training protocol helped novices accurately describe their mental states during two types of meditation: focused attention and open monitoring. After several weeks of daily practice, participants' self-reported ratings of their experience (i) differed between the two meditation states, (ii) reflected how much they had practiced and how tired they felt, and (iii) matched changes in their reaction times during a task. These patterns were better explained by features of daily practice than by a tendency to give socially desirable answers. The results suggest that novice practitioners can reliably report their inner experience, supporting further study of this training approach.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Empirical descriptions of the phenomenology of meditation states rely on practitioners' ability to provide accurate information on their experience. We present a meditation training protocol that was designed to equip naive participants with a theoretical background and experiential knowledge that would enable them to share their experience. Subsequently, novices carried on with daily practice during several weeks before participating in experiments. Using a neurophenomenological experiment designed to explore two different meditation states (focused attention and open monitoring), we found that self-reported phenomenological ratings (i) were sensitive to meditation states, (ii) reflected meditation dose and fatigue effects, and (iii) correlated with behavioral measures (variability of response time). Each of these effects was better predicted by features of participants' daily practice than by desirable responding. Our results provide evidence that novice practitioners can reliably report their experience along phenomenological dimensions and warrant the future investigation of this training protocol with a longitudinal design.