Individual differences in meditation outcomes

Abstract

Meditation generally has small to moderate effects on health and well-being, but some people experience greater benefits from meditation than others. What are the characteristics of the study participants or meditation students that lead to beneficial outcomes of meditation? This chapter adopts a multilevel approach to evaluate the evidence on the relationship between participant characteristics and individual differences in meditation outcomes across four sources of variability: personality and other psychological variables, biological variables, illness severity, and demographic factors. Research in the area is sparse and has several methodological shortcomings, thus the authors recommend the use of multilevel models and meta-regression as ways of properly incorporating the study of individual differences with other variables.