Mindfulness Meditation and Mutual Attunement: A Hyperscanning Perspective on Tacit Coordination

Rebbin, Daniel (2022) Mindfulness Meditation and Mutual Attunement: A Hyperscanning Perspective on Tacit Coordination. Bachelor thesis, Psychology.

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Abstract

Successful tacit coordination seems to hinge upon the ability to accurately model one another’s beliefs and mental states, referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM). Mindfulness meditation (MM) has previously shown to be a promising intervention for improving such perspective-taking abilities, procuring clinically significant results. In this study, we investigated whether an eight-week long MM intervention would improve ToM abilities. We measured inter-brain synchrony (IBS) during a task before and after the MM intervention, as hyperscanning had previously revealed patterns of emergent neural coupling in tacit coordination tasks. Our main hypothesis that MM would lead to greater IBS in frontal areas after the intervention could not be supported, as neither between-group or electrode-specific improvements were evident. Despite significantly improved post-intervention task performance, inferring a causal effect of our MM intervention on tacit coordination does not seem to be possible, when accounting for general learning effects and the absence of any IBS modulations. This null finding may be largely attributed to the limited sample size of our study but also other methodological limitations, like the task nature and intervention intensity, might have played a decisive role. Future research investigating IBS during tacit coordination tasks should afford enough power through ensuring (1) large sample sizes, (2) multimodal synchrony measurements and (3) a naturalistic task environment.

Item Type:	Thesis (Bachelor)
Supervisor name:	Ostafin, B.D.
Degree programme:	Psychology
Differentiation route:	None [Bachelor Psychology]
Date Deposited:	29 Aug 2022 07:10
Last Modified:	29 Aug 2022 07:10
URI:	http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/1350

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