Yoga and Adolescents: What Do We Know? The Effects of Yoga on Adolescents' Cognition and Social-Emotional Development.

Yoga;Adolescents;Psychology;Social Sciences;Psychology

Kokinakis, Leah HopeShah, Priti R. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Yoga;    Adolescents;    Psychology;    Social Sciences;    Psychology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/91559/leahhope_combined.pdf?sequence=8&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Yoga’s presence in mainstream American culture has grown dramatically during the past 30 years, with the number of practitioners almost doubling between 1998 and 2008.Researchers have begun to evaluate the impact of yoga practice on outcomes such as stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as attention and working memory.Early findings suggest that yoga practice is related to a host of positive outcomes, but interpretation of these findings is limited by methodological weaknesses.Yoga programs are being implemented in middle and high schools across the country, yet little is known about the impact of yoga practice on school-related variables, such as attention.This dissertation presents results from one of the first randomized, controlled trials of yoga for adolescents, and examines the effects of participation in a school-based yoga program on ninth-grade students’ working memory capacity, math performance, and attention problems, as well as affect, emotion regulation, and self-esteem.Results suggest that practicing yoga may be related to improvements in working memory capacity among boys.Similarly, yoga may protect boys against increases in negative affect.Although these results are promising, yoga practice was not related to changes in attention problems, and was only marginally related to emotion regulation.Counter to expectations, students in the yoga group showed decreases in positive affect over time, compared to control students.Additionally, girls in the yoga group showed larger decreases in self-esteem than girls in the control group.There is indication that yoga may have a positive effect on select outcomes, but many questions about the nature of yoga’s impact on young people have yet to be answered.