PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Practicing 'mindfulness' in summer camp benefits campers and counselors alike

Practicing 'mindfulness' in summer camp benefits campers and counselors alike
2021-04-13
(Press-News.org) With summer around the corner, a project shows how implementing an evidence-based mindfulness program in a summer camp setting decreases emotional distress in school age children and empowers campers and counselors alike - enhancing camper-counselor relationships. Mindfulness - a state of consciousness that fosters awareness - has the potential to help regulate emotions and behaviors.

Researchers from Florida Atlantic University's Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing implemented an eight-week program guided by the Mindful Schools© curricula in a large urban summer day camp program (ages 3 to seventh grade). Mindfulness-based practices are intentional exercises that cultivate mindfulness and engage youth to help develop attention to self and surroundings, social skills and emotional skills.

Results of the program evaluation, published in the Journal of Pediatric Nursing (online in December 2020 ahead of final publication in issue on March 1, 2021), showed that weekly mindfulness sessions appeared to empower campers with the ability to pay attention to self and surroundings while regulating emotions and behaviors. Mindfulness sessions for counselors empowered them to intentionally role model, utilize mindful strategies when dealing with difficult behaviors of campers and reinforced mindful practices to campers between weekly Mindful Schools© sessions.

According to the counselors' observations, 40 minutes of weekly mindful sessions were most influential in affecting campers' ability to self-regulate. Counselors also reported their own ability to increase classroom/cabin management and camper behavior management skills through the use of peace corners and portable mindfulness aids such as "calm down jars," stress balls and talking timers.

Campers attended an adapted 40-minute Mindful Schools© session once a week as part of the camp curriculum. Weekly sessions began with a didactic teaching related to select Mindful Schools© lesson topics. Then campers engaged in actual practice of mindfulness content; age-appropriate hands-on experiential activities were then implemented to reiterate and practice mindful content. To ensure learned material was retained, cabin peace corners containing material that reinforced mindfulness were designed and implemented into each cabin classroom.

All Mindful Schools© sessions were delivered by a pediatric nurse practitioner and/or a master's prepared registered nurse - both of whom were certified Mindful Schools© educators. The children participated in mindful breathing, daily use of peace corners and even used mindfulness tools like the calm down jars filled with water, glitter, clear glue and food coloring. For example, campers were instructed to shake their calm down jars and focus on the falling glitter while they practiced mindful breathing. Workstations that represented each mindful lesson were set up at the completion of the eight-week program and offered for campers to select their lesson of choice(s). The purpose of the workstations were to evaluate which mindfulness activities resonated most with campers for future camp program design.

"We found that mindful breathing, mindful bodies, and mindful listening assisted in bringing awareness to campers in the program and provided skills to address stressful experiences," said Andra S. Opalinski, Ph.D., APRN, co-author, an associate professor and assistant dean of graduate studies in FAU's Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing. "Since calm down jars and mindful pebbles were the two most preferred activities - both of which are in sync with the top three mindful practices implemented by the campers - offering such adapted age appropriate experiential activities may indeed reinforce and reiterate didactic teaching and be pertinent for the intersection of playing and learning for mindful practices in children."

Because studies have found mindfulness-based practices as an effective approach to addressing self-regulation/ behavior concerns in school age children and adolescents, Opalinski and Laurie A. Martinez, Ph.D., M.S.N., M.B.A., co-author, a registered nurse and a project coordinator in FAU's Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing, note that applying an evidence-based practice mindfulness program to summer camp programs, a setting in which large numbers of children participate, provides additional context for addressing and examining mental health promotion in pediatric populations.

"This application of an evidence-based program also showed that the use of Mindful Schools© allows for sustainability of the program because a nurse can be trained in the curriculum and adapt the lessons for an alternative setting to broaden the reach of mindfulness interventions to settings such as after school and summer activity programs, Boys and Girls Clubs as well as faith community programs that provide services for children and adolescents," said Martinez. "In fact, the Mindful Schools© educators are exploring the possibilities of conducting a research study to validate the effectiveness of curricula change."

INFORMATION:

This work was funded by FloridaBlue and the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church.

About the Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing: FAU's Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing is nationally and internationally known for its excellence and philosophy of caring science. The college is ranked No.1 in online graduate nursing programs in Florida and No. 23 in the nation by U.S. News and World Report. In 2017, with a 100 percent pass rate on the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN®), FAU BSN graduates, first-time test takers, ranked among the highest (No.1) in Florida and the United States. FAU's Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing is fully accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE). For more information, visit nursing.fau.edu.

About Florida Atlantic University: Florida Atlantic University, established in 1961, officially opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public university in Florida. Today, the University serves more than 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students across six campuses located along the southeast Florida coast. In recent years, the University has doubled its research expenditures and outpaced its peers in student achievement rates. Through the coexistence of access and excellence, FAU embodies an innovative model where traditional achievement gaps vanish. FAU is designated a Hispanic-serving institution, ranked as a top public university by U.S. News & World Report and a High Research Activity institution by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For more information, visit http://www.fau.edu.


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Practicing 'mindfulness' in summer camp benefits campers and counselors alike

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

A molecule that responds to light

A molecule that responds to light
2021-04-13
Light can be used to operate quantum information processing systems, e.g. quantum computers, quickly and efficiently. Researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Chimie ParisTech/CNRS have now significantly advanced the development of molecule-based materials suitable for use as light-addressable fundamental quantum units. As they report in the journal Nature Communications, they have demonstrated for the first time the possibility of addressing nuclear spin levels of a molecular complex of europium(III) rare-earth ions with light. (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22383-x) Whether in drug development, communication, or for climate forecasts: Processing information quickly and efficiently is crucial in many areas. It is currently done using digital computers, ...

Smell you later: Exposure to smells in early infancy can modulate adult behavior

Smell you later: Exposure to smells in early infancy can modulate adult behavior
2021-04-13
Imprinting is a popularly known phenomenon, wherein certain animals and birds become fixated on sights and smells they see immediately after being born. In ducklings, this can be the first moving object, usually the mother duck. In migrating fish like salmon and trout, it is the smells they knew as neonates that guides them back to their home river as adults. How does this happen? Exposure to environmental input during a critical period early in life is important for forming sensory maps and neural circuits in the brain. In mammals, early exposure to environmental inputs, as in the case of imprinting, is known to affect perception and social behavior later in life. Visual imprinting has ...

New advice for medics treating high blood pressure

2021-04-13
New research led by a professor at NUI Galway is set to change how doctors treat some patients with high blood pressure - a condition that affects more than one in four men and one in five women. The study by researchers at NUI Galway, Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Medical School found no evidence that diastolic blood pressure - the bottom reading on a blood pressure test - can be harmful to patients when reduced to levels that were previously considered to be too low. Lead researcher Bill McEvoy, Professor of Preventive Cardiology at NUI Galway and a Consultant Cardiologist at University Hospital Galway, said the findings have the potential to immediately influence ...

National narcissists likely to support greenwashing campaigns to improve nation's image

2021-04-13
New research by the University of Kent and the SWPS University has discovered that national narcissists are more likely to support greenwashing (misleading information about the environmental benefits of a product, a company or a policy) in order to improve their nation's public image. Findings show that while national narcissists are not likely to support genuine pro-environmental campaigns, they are ready to support political greenwashing campaigns. In business greenwashing decreases consumers' trust and undermines both the image and the profits of the companies that use this strategy. In the realms of politics, it may garner ...

Reducing ocean acidification by removing CO2: Two targets for cutting-edge research

Reducing ocean acidification by removing CO2: Two targets for cutting-edge research
2021-04-13
Is it possible to simultaneously address the increase of the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and the resulting acidification of the oceans? The research of the project DESARC-MARESANUS, a collaboration between the Politecnico di Milano and the CMCC Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change Foundation, explores the feasibility of this process, its chemical and environmental balance, and the benefits for the marine sector, focusing on the Mediterranean basin. It is now widely recognized that in order to reach the target of limiting global warming ...

Study shows multiple factors shape timing of birth in mule deer

Study shows multiple factors shape timing of birth in mule deer
2021-04-13
A five-year study of mule deer does and newborn fawns in western Wyoming shows that migrating deer have a lot to balance when it comes to birth timing. The study led by University of Wyoming scientists challenges the long-held assumption that animals match offspring birth with the peak green-up of forage at the birth site. Instead, only deer that migrated long distances and followed the flush of spring green-up from low elevation winter ranges to higher-elevation summer ranges were able to match birth with peak green-up. Other deer migrated shorter distances and gave birth earlier, but birth was out of sync with green-up. The researchers' work appears in the journal Ecology. To ...

Efficient generations of complex vectorial optical fields with metasurfaces

Efficient generations of complex vectorial optical fields with metasurfaces
2021-04-13
Light beams are widely used in photonics applications and attracted immense research interests. Compared to homogeneously polarized light beams, vectorial optical fields (VOFs) with tailored wave-fronts and inhomogeneous polarization distributions exhibits more advantages in applications comparing to their scalar-wave counterparts, thanks to the added degree of freedom (DOF) of polarization. By tailoring the polarization distributions, special VOFs such as flap-top beams and radially polarized beams can be generated, being highly favored in super-resolution microscopy, optical manipulations, etc. Despite of great advances in applications, generation of such complex VOFs are far from satisfactory. Available methods ...

SUTD breaks new ground in 3D printed soft robotics with largest range of polymer hybrids

2021-04-13
In a study published in Applied Materials Today, researchers from Singapore have developed the largest range of silicone and epoxy hybrid resins for the 3D printing of wearable devices, biomedical equipment, and soft robotics. The range of tunable functionally graded materials, which displayed over five orders of magnitude of elastic modulus, demonstrated excellent interfacial toughness, higher precision in complex structures and better fabrication control for the integration of mechatronic components. The multi-disciplinary team from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) highlighted the issue on the potential of soft robotics being limited in its robustness and ...

A novel, quick, and easy system for genetic analysis of SARS-CoV-2

A novel, quick, and easy system for genetic analysis of SARS-CoV-2
2021-04-13
Osaka, Japan - SARS-CoV-2 is the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. We know that mutations in the genome of SARS-CoV-2 have occurred and spread, but what effect do those mutations have? Current methods for studying mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 genome are very complicated and time-consuming because coronaviruses have large genomes, but now a team from Osaka University and Hokkaido University have developed a quick, PCR-based reverse genetics system for analyzing SARS-CoV-2 mutations. This system uses the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and a circular polymerase extension reaction (CPER) to reconstruct the full-length cDNA of viral genome. This process does not involve the use of bacteria, which can introduce further ...

The relationship between ENSO and Indian summer monsoon rainfall is restoring

The relationship between ENSO and Indian summer monsoon rainfall is restoring
2021-04-13
In the 1930s, English climatologist, Sir Gilbert Walker, successfully predicted Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) based on the relationship between Southern Oscillation and ISMR connected by what is later-called Walker circulation, which is regarded as the first achievement of modern climate prediction with a clear physical mechanism. The Southern Oscillation was also recognized as the atmospheric component of El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). However, at the end of the 20th century, a research in Science led by Indian climatologist Krishna Kumar found the significant reverse relationship between ENSO and Indian rainfall has been ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

KAIST Develops Retinal Therapy to Restore Lost Vision​

Adipocyte-hepatocyte signaling mechanism uncovered in endoplasmic reticulum stress response

Mammals were adapting from life in the trees to living on the ground before dinosaur-killing asteroid

Low LDL cholesterol levels linked to reduced risk of dementia

Thickening of the eye’s retina associated with greater risk and severity of postoperative delirium in older patients

Almost one in ten people surveyed report having been harmed by the NHS in the last three years

Enhancing light control with complex frequency excitations

New research finds novel drug target for acute myeloid leukemia, bringing hope for cancer patients

New insight into factors associated with a common disease among dogs and humans

Illuminating single atoms for sustainable propylene production

New study finds Rocky Mountain snow contamination

Study examines lactation in critically ill patients

UVA Engineering Dean Jennifer West earns AIMBE’s 2025 Pierre Galletti Award

Doubling down on metasurfaces

New Cedars-Sinai study shows how specialized diet can improve gut disorders

Making moves and hitting the breaks: Owl journeys surprise researchers in western Montana

PKU Scientists simulate the origin and evolution of the North Atlantic Oscillation

ICRAFT breakthrough: Unlocking A20’s dual role in cancer immunotherapy

How VR technology is changing the game for Alzheimer’s disease

A borrowed bacterial gene allowed some marine diatoms to live on a seaweed diet

Balance between two competing nerve proteins deters symptoms of autism in mice

Use of antifungals in agriculture may increase resistance in an infectious yeast

Awareness grows of cancer risk from alcohol consumption, survey finds

The experts that can outsmart optical illusions

Pregnancy may reduce long COVID risk

Scientists uncover novel immune mechanism in wheat tandem kinase

Three University of Virginia Engineering faculty elected as AAAS Fellows

Unintentional drug overdoses take a toll across the U.S. unequally, study finds

A step toward plant-based gelatin

ECMWF unveils groundbreaking ML tool for enhanced fire prediction

[Press-News.org] Practicing 'mindfulness' in summer camp benefits campers and counselors alike