A culturally appropriate mindfulness intervention to reduce health disparities among African Americans : feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of mantram repetition

[EMBARGOED UNTIL 5/1/2024] Mindfulness interventions improve psychological and physiological health outcomes because they interrupt the link between stress and disease processes. Despite the promise of these interventions in promoting health among clinical and non-clinical populations, African Americans--who share a disproportionate burden of chronic stress-related diseases--have been underrepresented in mindfulness research. Mindfulness interventions have been successfully adapted for specific treatment outcomes and some underserved populations, but despite the recognized need for culturally adapted interventions, little progress has been made in this area. Mantram repetition is one type of mindfulness intervention that is more flexible, culturally adaptable, and cost-efficient compared to many other mindfulness interventions. In four studies, the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of mantram repetition were examined. Meta-analytic results from Study 1 indicated that mantram repetition has a small, significant effect on various health and well-being outcomes (g = .444). In Study 2, results from qualitative interviews suggested that an online, asynchronous, customized mantram repetition intervention was of interest to African American community members. In Study 3, a customized intervention was developed and refined. In Study 4, the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of the customized intervention were demonstrated. The current studies suggest mantram repetition can be successfully implemented to improve health outcomes among African Americans.Includes bibliographical references

A Multi-Site Collaborative Study of the Hostile Priming Effect

In a now-classic study by Srull and Wyer (1979), people who were exposed to phrases with hostile content subsequently judged a man as being more hostile. And this “hostile priming effect” has had a significant influence on the field of social cognition over the subsequent decades. However, a recent multi-lab collaborative study (McCarthy et al., 2018) that closely followed the methods described by Srull and Wyer (1979) found a hostile priming effect that was nearly zero, which casts doubt on whether these methods reliably produce an effect. To address some limitations with McCarthy et al. (2018), the current multi-site collaborative study included data collected from 29 labs. Each lab conducted a close replication (total N = 2,123) and a conceptual replication (total N = 2,579) of Srull and Wyer’s methods. The hostile priming effect for both the close replication (d = 0.09, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.22], z = 1.34, p = .16) and the conceptual replication (d = 0.05, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.15], z = 1.15, p = .58) were not significantly different from zero and, if the true effects are non-zero, were smaller than what most labs could feasibly and routinely detect. Despite our best efforts to produce favorable conditions for the effect to emerge, we did not detect a hostile priming effect. We suggest that researchers should not invest more resources into trying to detect a hostile priming effect using methods like those described in Srull and Wyer (1979)