Formal Versus Informal Mindfulness Among University Students With and Without Recent Nonsuicidal Self-injury

Summary

The present study will use a randomized controlled design to investigate group differences between students with and without a history of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) in response to a single-session mindfulness induction across conditions (formal mindfulness induction, informal mindfulness induction, active control task) in terms of the intervention's acceptability and effectiveness. Effectiveness will be inferred via pre-post changes in state mindfulness, state stress, and state well-being.

Conditions

• Nonsuicidal Self-injury
• Mindfulness
• Stress
• Well-Being

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Formal mindfulness induction

The formal mindfulness induction will consist of a 10-minute audio recording of a sitting meditation, guiding the participant to consciously and repeatedly bring their attention to their breath and inner experience with nonjudgmental acceptance.

BEHAVIORAL

Informal mindfulness induction

The informal mindfulness induction will consist of on-screen instructions guiding participants through the completion of four routine tasks (washing hands, drinking water, laying down, listening to music) with mindful awareness and acceptance over the course of 10 minutes.

BEHAVIORAL

Active control task

Participants assigned to the active control condition will be prompted to download a single-page document containing 100 letters, numbers, and symbols, and a grid of 100 boxes. Following along with a guided audio, participants will be instructed to place all of the characters in the grid in a specific order over the course of 10 minutes. A version of this task has been used in previous studies by our team (Carsley \& Heath, 2019; Petrovic et al., 2022) and has been shown not to impact mindfulness levels, and was thus deemed an appropriate neutral attention task for this study.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

  collaborator OTHER

• McGill University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Nancy L. Heath, Ph.D. · McGill University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

29 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2022-11-08

Primary Completion

2023-05-16

Completion

2023-05-16

Countries

• Canada

Study Locations