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PERSONALITY AND MEDITATION |
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by Michael M. Delmonte Few would contest that external environmental factors play a role in personality development. However, little consideration has been given to various ‘internal’ techniques such as meditation and the extent to which they influence the expression of personality. Meditation is a self-generated experience, or an autogenic technique, which modifies our internal environment temporarily and it may be that this deliberate interference with subjective experiences is associated with measurable personality change. Are the effects of meditation limited to subjective experiences during practice, or are there also more long-term changes such as those reflected in personality scores? The response to this question is of interest for both theoretical and clinical reasons. If the answer is affirmative, and if observed changes are in the direction of improved psychological health, then this would provide important evidence that individuals can actively engage in covert health-promoting experiences. Most studies investigating the effects of meditation on personality have focused on neuroticism and anxiety. This allows the relationship between practice and psychological health to be investigated in the context of an extensive corpus of theory and scientific evidence. This chapter therefore begins with an examination of the effects of meditation on psychometric measures of anxiety and neuroticism. Then the effects of meditation on other corroboratory (but non-psychometric) measures of anxiety are reviewed. These include biochemical, motoric, and physiological indices of anxiety and arousal. The influence of meditation on self-esteem, depression, psychosomatic symptomatology, selfactualization, locus of control, and introversion is also reviewed and discussed. Shapiro (1982) described three broad groupings of attentional strategies in meditation: a focus on the whole field (wide-angle-lens attention) as in mindfulness meditation, a focus on a specific object within a field (zoom-lens attention) as in concentrative meditation, and a shifting back and forth between the two as in integrated meditation. Of these, concentrative meditation is the most widely practised in the West. Thus those forms of meditation in which focused attention plays a large role (such as TM, Zen meditation [But Zen is, as far as I know, a wide-angle-lens meditation] and their non-cultic or clinically adapted derivatives) will form the basis of the review. It may be that the various meditation techniques are associated with different outcomes. However, the limited number of comparative studies in which the effects of different techniques are contrasted makes definitive comment on this issue difficult. The clinical evidence ... suggests that meditation practice is associated with anxiety reduction though the research designs are inadequate to allow for more definitive conclusions. To what extent can one attribute the decreases in anxiety to regular meditation practice? Even if frequency of practice is related to such decrements, is it meditation per se that is the critical agent or must we look more carefully at ‘non-specific’ effects associated with practice? Decreases in anxiety have been
found to be positively related to frequency of practice by some authors (Tjoa
1975b; Williams et al. 1976; Fling et al. 1981) and not by others (Zuroff
and Schwarz 1978). Delmonte (1981a) found that both decrements in anxiety
and improved ‘present-self’ images were correlated with frequency of
practice. It is possible that, although practice frequency is in general
related to the benefits claimed, there may be a ‘ceiling effect’ above
which little further improvement is reported. For example, Peters et al.
(1977a) found that less than three practice periods per week produced
little change, whereas two daily sessions appeared to be more practice
than was necessary for many individuals to achieve positive change.
Similarly, Carrington et al. ( 1980) reported that ‘frequent’ and
‘occasional’ practitioners did not differ in terms of improvement. Both credibility of intervention and expectancy of benefit are positively related to improved self-reports. Highly credible control procedures have been found to be as effective as meditation in reducing anxiety (Smith 19761. In a very careful study, Smith randomly assigned subjects to meditation or to a placebo condition which was designed to match ‘the form, complexity, and expectation-fostering aspects of TM’ and involved simply sitting quietly twice daily. Both interventions were equally effective in reducing trait anxiety, striated muscle tension and skin conductance reactivity. However, it could be argued that just sitting is also a standard form of meditation (see Watts 1957). Smith also compared two other groups exposed to similar fostering of expectation. Again, he found no significant differences between the groups on the outcome measures even though one group practised a ‘TM-like meditation exercise’ and the other ‘an exercise designed to be the near antithesis of meditation’. The latter exercise involved deliberate cognitive activity such as ‘fantasy, day dreaming, storytelling and listening’. Delmonte (1981a) found that expectancy of benefit from meditation practice assessed prior to initiation is related both to the frequency of practice and to the reported benefits of such practice. Similarly, Kirsch and Henry (1979) reported that high credibility of rationale for meditation was significantly related to reduced anxiety. It could, therefore, be argued that the reductions in anxiety associated with meditation practice simply reflect a quasi-placebo effect. Only Zuroff and Schwarz (1978) found that expectations of benefit were not significantly correlated with such reductions (though this finding could be explained by the relatively broad assessment of expectancy employed). In conclusion, a strong case can be made for taking ‘nonspecific’ factors into account in any conceptualization of the effects of meditation on personality. These ... studies demonstrate that meditators readily show decreases on self-report measures of anxiety but that these decrements may not be validated by concurrent reductions on more objective indices. If the effects of meditation are mode specific, as the multiprocess model of anxiety (Schwarz et al. 1978) would predict, then it may be that the effects of meditation are more readily apparent with self-report (predominantly cognitive) than with behavioural or physiological measures. The outcomes of these studies appear to be consistent with the multiprocess model which predicts some desynchrony between and within physiological, cognitive, behavioural, and biochemical indices of anxiety and arousal. The more parsimonious interpretation is that it is easier to ‘fake good’ with self-report than with behavioural, biochemical, or physiological markers of anxiety. However, the outcome of the Zuroff and Schwarz study, in which only the meditation group reported significant reductions in both self-report and behavioural measures of anxiety, is not consistent with this interpretation. Overall, there is little compelling evidence to date that meditation practice actually produces change in this [introversion-extraversion] dimension of personality. Rather, it appears that those attracted to meditation are relatively introverted. In other words, extraverts may be less inclined to either take up or maintain practice. Those introverts who do take up meditation may, with practice, become somewhat less introverted. Conclusions It is noteworthy that negative self-concepts and high levels of reported symptomatology predict attrition from meditation practice. This trend is consistent with reports that high levels of anxiety, neuroticism, and psychological malaise also predict a tendency to drop out of practice (Delmonte 1980, 1981a, 1985b). It appears that those with profiles from the psychological distress end of the continuum tend to respond poorly to meditation and that practice appears to be more rewarding for those who appear to need it least in terms of psychological profile. However, there is evidence that meditation practice increases reported levels of self-actualization and reduces anxiety and depression. In conclusion, meditation practice appears to be beneficial in reducing anxiety and depression and in increasing self-actualization. This is particularly so for those individuals who take up meditation for intrinsic reasons, that is, those who are psychologically relatively healthy and are not using meditation to solve serious problems of living. The latter could still benefit from carefully supervised meditation -- provided the supervisor is familiar with both meditation and clinical practice. This review therefore suggests that researchers and clinicians alike could profitably direct energies into further exploring the value of meditation, in all its forms, in daily living. Although practice has been found to be associated with personality changes in the direction of psychological well-being, it may be incorrect to conclude that meditation techniques ‘produce’ these changes independently of the practitioner’s wishes and desires. Meditation is a self-directed and active process in which a technique is used by a person (not on a person) in the context of particular subjective expectations and objectives. For this reason meditation may not be readily dispensed, like medication, to anxious or depressed patients if they show little motivation to practice. The value of meditation may be greater for those who wish to be involved in directing their own development than for those wanting to be ‘cured’ passively.
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