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Recent studies showed mixed findings regarding the sustainability of the effects of mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation interventions. This study, conducted on a sample of 128 management students divided into treatment and control groups, is the first that examines the long-term effects of the training in relational mindfulness. We focus on Relational Mindfulness Training (RMT), an 8-week intervention designed to help participants to be more present, aware, and kind towards themselves and others during social interactions. The results show a significant long-term impact of RMT on self-compassion, perceived stress and mindfulness. The impact of RMT on compassion and subjective happiness was significant in the short run, but only marginally significant in the long run for compassion and non-significant for subjective happiness. Furthermore, individuals who maintained an individual practice in the follow-up period showed notably better results concerning all examined effects, except compassion. The results suggest that the development of compassion is more dependent on the context of a training group. We provide recommendations for future interventions in order that they can make a more sustainable impact on compassion.

The dynamic structure of the EEG signal is characterized by segments of synchronization and desynchronization. In this paper, the frequency and duration of these segments were monitored during calm meditation and insight meditation in experienced and naive meditators. A newly developed methodology based on complex continuous wavelet coherence was used to estimate these parameters. The durations highly depend on frequency band and vary from 60 ms to 250 ms. A shorter duration and a lower frequency of synchronization were found for experienced meditators during both types of meditations for the real and the imaginary parts of the complex continuous wavelet coherence. The greatest duration differences were in the gamma band, which may be associated with handling attention during meditation, whereas the differences in the alpha band were most significant for frequency. Combining the two parameters resulted in the total duration of the synchronization, which has discriminative accuracy of up to 100% and appears to be a sensitive parameter of the length of training of meditators.

In this study, the performance of Sevcik’s algorithm that calculates the fractal dimension and permutation entropy as discriminants to detect calming and insight meditation in electroencephalo-graphic (EEG) signals was assessed. The proposed methods were applied to EEG recordings from meditators practicing insight meditation and calming meditation before as well as during both types of meditation. Analysis was conducted using statistical hypothesis testing to determine the validity of the proposed meditation-identifying techniques. For both types of meditation, there was a statistically significant reduction in the permutation entropy. This result can be explained by the increased EEG synchronization, which is repeatedly observed in the course of meditation. In contrast, the fractal dimension (FD) was significantly increased during calming meditation, but during insight meditation, no statistically significant change was detected. Increased FD during meditation can be interpreted as an increase in self-similarity of EEG signals during self-organisation of hierarchical structure oscillators in the brain. Our results indicate that fractal dimension and permutation entropy could be used as parameters to detect both types of meditation. The permutation entropy is advantageous compared with the fractal dimension because it does not require a stationary signal.

Complex continuous wavelet coherence (WTC) can be used for non-stationary signals, such as electroencephalograms. Areas of the WTC with a coherence higher than the calculated optimal threshold were obtained, and the sum of their areas was used as a criterion to differentiate between groups of experienced insight-focused meditators, calm-focused meditators and a control group. This method demonstrated the highest accuracy for the real WTC parts in the frontal region, while for the imaginary parts, the highest accuracy was shown for the frontal occipital pairs of electrodes. In the frontal area, in the broadband frequency, both types of experienced meditators demonstrated an enlargement of the increased coherence areas for the real WTC parts. For the imaginary parts unaffected by the volume conduction and global artefacts, the most significant increase occurred for the frontal occipital pair of electrodes.