Publications

Abstract

High rates of mental health issues have been reported among legal professionals and law students alike. Research conducted in the legal field and beyond has consistently linked mindfulness with improved well-being. Consequently, in 2019, Thomas Telfer launched an upper year credit course called Mindfulness and the Legal Profession at Western University, Faculty of Law with the intention of bolstering student wellness and providing training in skills not traditionally covered in the law school curriculum. The course-believed to be the first credit course on mindfulness at a Canadian law school-combines a daily mindfulness practice with readings and discussion on topics such as mental health, focus and distraction, emotional intelligence, resilience, compassion, mindful listening, negotiation, and legal ethics. This paper presents a qualitative study of student reflections on the course. Our analysis shows that the course had a significant impact on participants' mental health and led to growth in skills relevant to the legal profession, including improved communication skills, enhanced focus, and increased productivity. Participants also experienced greater self-awareness and an enhanced ability to attend to the present moment. Many participants expressed an intention to use the skills that they learned in the course in their professional lives moving forward and a belief that the law school curriculum should be expanded to include courses such as Mindfulness and the Legal Profession. We argue that there is value to be gained from teaching law students about mindfulness. Courses such as Mindfulness and the Legal Profession belong in the law school curriculum and are deserving of consideration by the broader legal community.

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Abstract

a. Objectives: Two studies were conducted to determine whether mindfulness meditation could be an effective tool for improving well-being among legal professionals—a population plagued by high rates of depression, anxiety, and stress.

b. Methods: Study 1. Legal professionals completed questionnaires before and after an 8-week mindfulness program. Study 2. Lawyers were randomly assigned to either an experimental or waitlist condition. Questionnaires were administered at the beginning of the study and after experimental participants had completed a 30-day intervention. 

c. Results: Study 1. Participants reported significant improvements in mood, resilience, trait mindfulness, stress, anxiety, and depression over time. Study 2. Post-intervention, experimental participants reported better mood, lower levels of stress, and higher levels of non-reactivity and observing than waitlist participants.

d. Conclusions: Mindfulness and meditation may effectively improve well-being among legal professionals

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Problem solving and decision making are both examples of complex, higher-order thinking. Both involve the assessment of the environment, the involvement of working memory or short-term memory, reliance on long term memory, effects of knowledge, and the application of heuristics to complete a behavior. A problem can be defined as an impasse or gap between a current state and a desired goal state. Problem solving is the set of cognitive operations that a person engages in to change the current state, to go beyond the impasse, and achieve a desired outcome. Problem solving involves the mental representation of the problem state and the manipulation of this representation in order to move closer to the goal. Problems can vary in complexity, abstraction, and how well defined (or not) the initial state and the goal state are. Research has generally approached problem solving by examining the behaviors and cognitive processes involved, and some work has examined problem solving using computational processes as well. Decision making is the process of selecting and choosing one action or behavior out of several alternatives. Like problem solving, decision making involves the coordination of memories and executive resources. Research on decision making has paid particular attention to the cognitive biases that account for suboptimal decisions and decisions that deviate from rationality. The current bibliography first outlines some general resources on the psychology of problem solving and decision making before examining each of these topics in detail. Specifically, this review covers cognitive, neuroscientific, and computational approaches to problem solving, as well as decision making models and cognitive heuristics and biases.

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The dual-process theory of thinking defines a heuristic-based System I which trades-off precision and accuracy in favour of speed. It is prone to a consistent range of error modes formalized as cognitive biases. In contrast, System II is slower, requires deliberate engagement but can work through complex problems with lower error. Mindfulness research points to positive improvements in higher-cognition processes with specific emphasis on attention and an attitude of non-judgement; both are thought to underlie successful recruitment of System II. We hypothesized that individuals with higher mindfulness would be less susceptible to common cognitive biases. We evaluate two constructs of mindfulness. Trait mindfulness: a long-term dispositional mindfulness which can be enhanced via deliberate training but otherwise remains consistent across an individual’s lifetime. State mindfulness: refers to a short-term experience of mindfulness which is subject to experimental manipulation. The present study consists of two-arms. The first arm (N = 391) was administered completely online and evaluates trait mindfulness. The second arm (N =191) was conducted in-lab and randomized participants into one of two conditions: mindfulness induction or a sham control condition. Participants from both arms underwent performance assessment on a battery of common cognitive bias tasks. We found that trait mindfulness was associated with reduced susceptibility to specific biases: anchoring, resistance to sunk costs, availability, and logical fallacies. Contrary to expectations, experimental manipulation of state mindfulness did not influence susceptibility to cognitive biases when compared to the sham control. These findings suggest trait, but not state mindfulness may improve resistance to cognitive biases. 

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Participants completed several self-assessments that measured depressive symptoms, hypomania, and mood. They were then asked to learn either a set of rule-based categories or a set of non-rule-based categories. Correlational analyses suggested that participants with high levels of self-reported depression were impaired on complex rule learning. In contrast, performance on a rule-based learning task was found to be improved by high levels of current positive mood. Multiple linear regression analyses further revealed that, when the variance due to other constructs was removed, the relationship between depressive symptoms and rule-based performance disappeared while the relationship between positive mood and rule-based performance remained significant. These findings suggest that positive mood is related to enhanced rule learning abilities. Neither level of depression nor positive mood were found to be related to performance on categories that could be learned via associative processes. This dissociation provides evidence for a dual systems approach to categorization. These findings also suggest that executive functioning impairments observed among individuals with depression may be specifically related to a lack of positive mood rather than overall depressive symptoms, per se.  

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Mindfulness refers to a quality of consciousness that is characterized by a purposeful and non-judgmental awareness of the present moment. A state of mindfulness can be deliberately evoked through activities like meditation, where one actively pays attention to the sensations and/or thoughts they experience while laying or sitting in silent reflection. People can be further characterized by what is referred to as trait mindfulness, which is similar to a personality trait in that it describes a natural capacity for mindfulness or how mindful someone tends to be on a regular basis. Previous research has linked both state and trait mindfulness to a number of positive outcomes, including enhanced mood and well-being. The purpose of this dissertation was to assess the effectiveness of three mindfulness-based interventions that were designed to improve the health and wellness of lawyers and graduate students — both of which are populations plagued by high rates of depression, anxiety, and stress. Interventions included an 8-week program called the Anxious Lawyer program, a 30-day program called Mindful Pause, and a 4-week program that was adapted from the Anxious Lawyer program. All three of the interventions involved online guided meditations and the Anxious Lawyer programs also included readings about mindfulness and suggestions for non-meditation-based mindfulness activities (e.g., cultivating a mindful approach to walking or eating). Participants reported decreased stress, improved mood, and increased levels of trait mindfulness following completion of each of the programs. The adapted Anxious Lawyer program was additionally linked to decreases in the severity of depression-related symptoms (e.g., negative thinking and lack of motivation) and the original Anxious Lawyer program was found to increase psychological resilience (i.e., one’s ability to bounce back in difficult situations) and decrease symptoms associated with anxiety (e.g., excessive agitation). Mindfulness training, therefore, seems to have improved well-being among the participants in these studies and may be beneficial for lawyers and students who are struggling. 

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Cognitive flexibility is the ability to think diversely in order to solve problems and learn concepts. It has also been suggested that cognitive flexibility supports creativity. Research has demonstrated that creativity is enhanced by moderate volumes of ambient noise. This thesis sought to replicate and extend this line of research by investigating how noise affects cognitive flexibility. Study 1 assessed the effects of noise on three creativity tasks. Performance was found to be enhanced by ambient noise, particularly among those who listen to music while they study/work. Study 2 examined how noise affects performance on a category learning task designed to measure cognitive flexibility. Category learning was neither enhanced nor impaired by ambient noise. This work suggests that noise may be beneficial for creativity but not for learning. Further research is needed to clarify the effect that ambient noise has on cognitive flexibility as it applies to other, non-learning-based tasks. 

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When people engage in social interactions, their behaviours tend to fluctuate in response to the behaviours of their interaction partners, such that their affiliation becomes more similar and their dominance becomes more opposite. Interpersonal theorists (e.g., Kielser, 1996) refer to this phenomenon as complementarity. A computer joystick method, developed by Sadler et al. (2009), provides researchers with the unique ability to capture behavioural changes on these two dimensions continuously, and simultaneously. However, theories of cognitive processing predict an inability to effectively multitask; therefore, joystick coding both affiliation and dominance simultaneously may reduce the efficiency of the collected ratings. The present study explored this possibility by investigating how reliabilities of ratings collected on the two dimensions separately compared to those collected on both dimensions simultaneously. Contrary to what was predicted, coding the dimensions separately resulted in decreases in reliabilities of the means and of the time-series. Consequently, multitasking does not appear to be a factor in simultaneously collecting ratings of dominance and affiliation with the joystick method. Therefore, there is no evidence to suggest that the traditional application of the joystick method should be altered for future coding. 

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