ارزیابی اثربخشی تمرینهای ذهن آگاهی بر کارکردهای اجرایی دانش آموزان دختر ابتدایی

Objective: The present study aimed to investigate effectiveness of mindfulness exercises on&nbsp;the executive functions of elementary school students. Methods: To this end, 32 female students of second and third grade were selected by cluster&nbsp;sampling method with regard to inclusion criteria (having average IQ, being right-handed)&nbsp;and exclusion criteria (having physical and mental illness, or psychological and psychiatric&nbsp;interventions) and randomly assigned in experimental (mean&plusmn;SD age; 97.12&plusmn;3.48 mo) and control groups (mean&plusmn;SD age; 96.18&plusmn;3.33 mo). Then, the experimental group participated&nbsp;in 8 sessions of mindfulness exercise (each session, 1 h), but control group received no&nbsp;intervention. Before and after intervention, all participants took working memory test,&nbsp;continuous performance test, and Wisconsin card sorting test. Finally, the obtained data were&nbsp;analyzed by ANCOVA with SPSS 21 software. Results: Our findings showed that mindfulness had significant effect on forward and backward&nbsp;memory as well as total score of memory (P<0.01). Also, findings showed that mindfulness&nbsp;improved perseveration dimension of cognitive flexibility (P<0.05). Finally, mindfulness&nbsp;could somewhat improve response time of attention (P<0.01). Conclusion: These findings are consistent with previous research in which the effectiveness&nbsp;of mindfulness on executive functions was approved, though in some dimensions of our&nbsp;variables, the effects were not significant which might be due to the limited sessions of training.