Efeitos do programa de mindfulness/atenção plena

: mindfulschools : num grupo de crianças dos 5 aos 9 anos

Abstract

Introduction: Research on mindfulness programs in school context has increased in recent years and looks promising. However, it is still unclear the impact of these programs and what form of training has the greatest benefits, considering the individual ages and characteristics of children. The present study aims to analyze the effects of the Mindful schools program in attention, inhibitory control, and behavior in children in the school context.Methodology: Participants were 16 children, from 5 to 9 years old, distributed equally by their age and parents' educational qualifications in two groups: the experimental group and the control group (waiting list). The Mindfulness - Mindful schools Program was applied to the experimental group, consisting of 8 sessions, 30 minutes each, over the course of 8 weeks in a row. The instruments applied were the Skills and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ, parent version; Fleitlich et al., 2005), the Two-Signal CancellationTest (BANC, Simões et al., 2016) and a Go/No-Go task of inhibitory control (Howard & Okely, 2015).Results: Comparing the performance in the SDQ instrument, before and after the training program, there were significant differences in the experimental group, but not in the control group, in which the results point to an improvement in the scales of emotional problems, externalization, internalization and prosocial behaviors. Also, in task Go/No-Go significant differences were identified in the experimental group, since in this group there were higher values in the accuracy in No-Go and impulse control.Regarding the levels of attention, both groups obtained significant improvements in the overall value of the signal cancellation test.Conclusions: Although the identified limitation of the reduced sample, it is concluded that the results are promising in the dimensions of behavior and inhibition control in agreement with previous studies showing changes after mindfulness programs in children. This work represents a contribution in the study of mindfulness in the school context that needs further investigation with controlled experimental procedures and with larger samples.

Date of Award	29 Dec 2020
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Joana Rodrigues Rato (Supervisor)