Theses

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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