Gallery Presentation International Positive Psychology Association 7th IPPA World Congress 2021

Improvements in Flourishing and Emotion Regulation among College Students Following a Week of Classroom-Based Yoga and Meditation Workshop on ‘Inner Clarity’ (#306)

Garima Rajan 1 , Kamlesh Singh 1
  1. Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India, New Delhi, DELHI, India

Yoga and meditation are widely being incorporated as interventions to help college students improve their happiness and emotional regulation in everyday stressful situations in life. In the present study, 45 college students (40 Males and 5 Females; Mage= 21.42 years; SD= 0.97) from an engineering institute in Delhi participated in a Yoga and Meditation based ‘Inner Clarity’ workshop organized by the value education center of the college. The following standardized psychometric assessments namely, The Multidimensional Flourishing Scale, Sat-Chit-Ananda Scale, and Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-Short version were administered via Google Forms for pre-post testing in order to examine the psychological effectiveness of the workshop. The rigorous workshop lasted for 6 days with its schedule spanning roughly 12 hours each day starting with Pranayama, Suryanamaskar and Yoga Asanas followed by lecture sessions which covered topics on building robust health, balanced emotions, and sharp cognition. These sessions adopted a multi-disciplinary perspective with a focus on Indian Yogic traditions along with principles from mainstream psychology on emotion and cognition. The last session of each day had guided meditation in classroom by a trained practitioner who used techniques of rotation of awareness throughout the body, thought focusing, and deepening of the breath. Results showed statistically significant differences at p<0.05, p<0.01, and p<0.001  levels for pre-post test scores on social, emotional, and psychological wellbeing, use of negative emotion regulation strategy of self-blame, use of positive emotion regulation the strategy of refocusing and sat (truth) and antahshakti (inner strength). The findings from the present study have been discussed in light of the existing research. This study provides further evidence to include yoga and meditation based-workshops in the academic curriculum to help college students increase their positive emotions, decrease negative emotions, enhance their emotion regulation strategies and help them improve their flourishing and lead a happier life. 


 

  • Keywords: Coping and Emotion Regulation, Mindfulness, Positive emotions, Religion and Spirituality