Monday, February 21, 2011

Psychology Today Blog Post: "Confronting Death with an Open, Mindful Attitude"

Back in November, I posted about a study in which the researchers examined the impact of mindfulness on mortality salience ("Being Present in the Face of Existential Threat"). Today, one of the authors and George Mason University professor Dr. Todd Kashdan published a blog post about the study on the Psychology Today website

Dr. Kashdan provides a nice summary of the research and reflects upon his personal interest in the topic. He writes:

So what do mindful people do that allows them to confront death in a non-defensive manner? What we found was that when asked to deeply contemplate their death, mindful people spent more time writing (as opposed to avoiding) and used more death-related words when reflecting on the experience. This suggests that a greater openness to processing the threat of death allows compassion and fairness to reign. In this laboratory staged battle, mindfulness alters the power that death holds over us. Pretty cool.

To read Dr. Kashdan's full post, click here. To read the Scientific Mindfulness post on the original article, click here.

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