Mindfulness

My name is Dan Huston. I am a member of NCA and the Spiritual Communication division. I have been planning to submit a proposal to this year’s conference, but I have not decided through which division yet.

I am writing, therefore, to get your opinion as to whether or not the following topic would be appropriate for the Spiritual Communication division and possibly the preconference.

Two colleagues and I recently submitted a paper to a special edition of an NCA journal focusing on spiritual practices in communication. We submitted a paper about our findings in a study done last year at my community college. For over ten years now, I have been using mindfulness meditation in the teaching of communications. It has been very popular among students and I have lots of anecdotal evidence of its success.

We finally conducted a controlled study using pre and post tests to measure mindfulness and positive reappraisal. Students taking the mindfulness version of the course improved significantly in mindfulness compared with controls and their form of positive reappraisal differed from that of the control group in significant ways, namely they got better at identifying and expressing emotions when faced with difficult situations, while the control group was simply more likely to shift blame on themselves or others. Also, there appeared to be a direct correlation between increases in mindfulness and increases in positive reappraisal.

I would love to present not only on the study but on the curriculum itself. Please let me know your thoughts.
Thanks for your time.

Dan
dhuston@ccsnh.edu