Evaluación de un programa de entrenamiento basado en Mindfulness: Efectos psicológicos, neuropsicológicos y emocionales.

Identifier:  TDX:3340

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX3340

Authors:  Ventura Montserrat, David

Abstract:
Scientific studies have shown that teaching professionals have higher vulnerability to suffering from mental disorders, especially those related to emotional disturbances. Also, different authors have pointed out the lack of programs meant to give them effective strategies to deal with that kind of situations. Given the fact that previous scientific literature shows that Mindfulness has been integrated into structured programs with positive results regarding the decrease of a wide range of psychopathological symptoms and the improvement of neuropsychological performance, one goal of this thesis is to study the effects of a program based on the practice of Mindfulness as an alternative way of prevention in mental health issues among teaching staff. The randomized controlled study was carried out with two groups; a control and an experimental group; and in two stages of evaluation; pre and post-training. The training program showed a high potential of improvement in a group of psychological, neuropsychological and emotional variables related to well-being and to the ability of emotional regulation among the teachers. However, only the more robust effects involved any difference among the groups, specifically in the ability to observe and in the short-term memory. A second objective of this thesis is the research of a more objective methodology to evaluate the emotional state and their changes after the use of programs like the one previously mentioned. Therefore, a second sample was exposed to audiovisual stimuli which had previously been validated subjectively. During the viewing, the participants’ facial expression was recorded and evaluated through an artificial neural network according to the categorical classification of basic emotions. The results showed the ability of those stimuli to induce complex emotions or even mixed with joint activation and deactivation patterns as well as the capability to evaluate the facial expression in an automatized way as analytical methodology.