The Effects of Mindfulness Practice on Happines

บทคัดย่อ

The purposes of this study were to examine the effects of mindfulness practice on happiness. Participants (N=39) were Chiang Mai University students, recruited from Mental Health Course: 15 were assigned to be in experiment group and 24 in control group by the purposive sampling method. Instruments used in this study were 1) Mindfulness Practice Programbased on Plum Village approachand 2) Subjective Happiness Scale for Thais, which was tested for content validity, concurrent validity, and index of item-objective congruence by experts (at the level 1.0) and for the whole test reliability with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (α = .70). In addition, the qualitative data were collected with the participants’ self-observation form. Data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, paired t-test, and one-way Repeated Measure ANOVA, together with the analysis of the qualitative data, to compare the effects ofmindfulness practice on happiness of the students in the experiment group, before, after the practice, and during the follow-up period. Results revealed that after the mindfulness practice, happiness of the participants in the experiment and control groups were significantly different (p = .001). The level of happiness of the students in the experiment group after participating mindfulness was significantly higher than that before the practice (p = .001). Accordingly, it can be concluded that the mindfulness practice had an effect on the happiness level