Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

The negative effects of stress on mental health increase with age. Stress has been shown to exacerbate conditions such as cognitive impairment in older adults. However, activities that promote mindfulness, such as sitting meditation, have been demonstrated to have a protective effect on mental health. Mindfulness has been defined as sustained, moment-to-moment attention to the present, and is thought to reduce stress by interrupting reflexive judgmental thoughts. Multiple studies have examined how mindfulness operates as an exercise in attention that be transferred to measurable forms of attention, and have found that older adults trained in mindfulness improve their scores on a variety of attention tests in addition to improving their wellbeing. However, as mindfulness itself requires the use of sustained attention, its stress-reducing capabilities might only be available to older adults whose cognitive health has been resistant to its expected age-related decline. I propose to study how older adults' preexisting capacity to devote sustained attention to a task could predict the success of mindfulness training in reducing their perceived stress. Participating men and women over the age of 65 will be assessed on a sustained attention task and divided into a high-performing group and a low-performing group. They will also report on their perceived stress. All will undergo 8 weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, an extensively researched mindfulness learning program, and will then be tested again on their perceived stress. I predict that participants who can better sustain attention will more effectively reduce their stress using mindfulness techniques. Clinicians could structure tress-reduction programs accordingly.