Open Collections

Brief mindfulness training for counselling psychology students : effects on self-compassion and reperceiving

University of British Columbia

Teaching mindfulness to counselling students may provide another avenue for developing their clinical skills. Current research supports the idea that mindfulness can be beneficially introduced into graduate training in counselling. How and why this training should take place remains an underexplored phenomenon. The current study investigates whether a brief introduction to mindfulness training and practice can impact counselling students’ ability to take a compassionate attitude toward themselves (self-compassion) and their ability to be a witness to their own experience (reperceiving). Participants received one hour of training in mindfulness practices and then took part in 15 minutes of these practices each week before they saw clients in their first clinical experience. Two studies were conducted, each using different approaches to test the question of whether this intervention could have an effect on self-report scores in self-compassion, reperceiving and/or mindfulness. In study A, a concurrent, repeated measures design found indications that self-compassion scores increased after 12 weeks of mindfulness practice but did not find any changes in reperceiving or mindfulness scores. In study B, a concurrent, single-case design found no evidence to support a functional relationship between the intervention and any of the three dependent measures. Limitations in study design may be the cause of this insufficiency. Overall this project provides evidence for increases in self-compassion scores after one semester of brief mindfulness practice while no changes were found in reperceiving or mindfulness scores.

Text

2013-04-16

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/44204

Counselling Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/