Effects of the application of a mindfulness programme on anxiety and attention in adolescent students
Keywords:
Mindfulness, anxiety, attention, students, educationCopyright (c) 2025 José Antonio Molina del Peral
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Interest in mindfulness programmes is steadily increasing, due to the positive results that empirical research has gathered after years of diverse studies. One of the fields in which great benefits could be achieved is education since mindfulness favors many of the mental processes necessary in the teaching-learning process. The aims of the present study were to compare the levels of the anxiety, in its trait and state versions, and the focused attention after an 8-session mindfulness programme. The sample consisted of 138 participants in the 1st and 2nd years of compulsory secondary education, aged between 12 and 14 years, who were administered the Trait-State Anxiety Questionnaire, version for adolescents (Spielberger, Gorsuch & Lushene, 1982) and the Revised Perception of Differences Test (Thurstone y Yela, 2012) as a pretest and posttest measure. After the application of the mindfulness programme, significant differences were found in both variables, in a positive sense for the attention variable and in a negative sense for state and trait anxiety. Possible explanatory factors for the increase in anxiety after the implementation of the mindfulness programme and the positive effects on attention after the implementation of theprogramme are analyzed, considering key factors such as the implementation of the programme by an inexperienced person, or the time when the programme was implemented and the post-test measure, close to the exams.
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