Effect of Mindfulness on Emotional Liability among Adolescents

The transition to adolescence presents developmental challenges in physical, social, intellectual and psychological arenas. Adolescents typically experience more intense emotions. Life becomes more complex, and more mature coping skills are required to navigate this terrain effectively. To help them 'surf the waves' of emotion changes mindfulness based programs have been incorporated in therapy for adolescents with clinical issues. In Indian context, there is paucity of research dealing with helping non-clinical adolescents with their emotional turmoil. Present research, based upon Ecological momentary assessment, focuses upon understanding and exploring emotional liability in adolescents and observing effect of mindfulness on regulating emotions. Measurement of emotional liability was derived from self report of emotions gathered from 106 participants (57 experimental, 49 control) sampled four times daily over first four and last four days of intervention program. Twenty days long Mindfulness Meditation Intervention (MMI) was adopted from sitting meditation designed by Jon Kabat-Zinn (2012). Results show that positive index of liability and negative index of liability are positively correlated and the correlation decreased significantly after MMI. Gain score analysis reflected that in experimental group negative emotional liability and distraction reduced significantly as compared to control group. Detailed analysis of control group showed that distraction increased while relaxed mood decreased in 20 days long period. While in experimental group boredom, anger and distraction reduced significantly. This shows that mindfulness meditation practice has helped adolescent to reflect upon their emotions, reducing negative emotions and being able to achieve better balance between positive and negative emotions. The finding would be used in development of various emotion regulation programs for adolescent at personal level and educational setup.