Mindfulness Training in Military Spouses

University of Miami

Status: Completed

Conditions: Psychological Stress

Treatments: Behavioral: Mindfulness training

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03308344

20120295

Details and patient eligibility

About

This project aims to contextualize the delivery of mindfulness training for military spouses and evaluate its effectiveness on measures of executive functions and psychological well-being.

Full description

In addition to psychological and physical health challenges that military service members face, military deployment is known to have deleterious effects on the entire family unit. The January 2010 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reported medical data from over 250,000 wives of deployed soldiers. These women suffered from clinically significant levels of anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances, and adjustment disorders. Thus, the psychological profile of military spouses sadly parallels that of the military servicemembers. Unfortunately, the effect of deployment on the psychological health in military spouses is largely unstudied, and very few resilience-building programs are available for military families.

Prior research showed that mindfulness training (MT), as a resilience-building program in civilian and military servicemembers, can effectively protect against degradation in of executive functions (i.e., attention, working memory) and benefit psychological well-being over high-demand intervals. While research evidence mounts that MT is beneficial for service members, there is almost no research examining the impact of MT on military spouses' cognitive functioning and psychological well-being.

The present study aims to investigate if MT may successfully benefit cognitive functioning and psychological well-being in military spouses.

Enrollment: 106 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 65 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• English-speaking
• Being in a relationship or married to U.S. Army active-duty member or veteran.

Exclusion criteria

• A non-controlled severe medical disease that might interfere with the performance in the study.
• Any other condition that the investigator might deem problematic for the inclusion of the volunteer in a training study of this nature.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Basic Science

Allocation: Non-Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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106 participants in 3 patient groups

Spouse Trainers (MT-ST)

Experimental group

Description:

Participants will engage in a short-form mindfulness training delivered by their peers who underwent an extensive training practicum.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Mindfulness training

Wait-list control

No Intervention group

Description:

Participants will be tested before and after a no-training interval and may receive training at a later time.

Mindfulness Expert (MT-ME)

Experimental group

Description:

Participants will engage in a short-form mindfulness training delivered by an expert mindfulness trainer.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Mindfulness training