标题: 2022.02.15 冥想应用程序是否有效？ [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-2-16 07:09 标题: 2022.02.15 冥想应用程序是否有效？ Daily chart
Are meditation apps effective?
New research suggests that they may have benefits—for those who stick with them
Feb 15th 2022
Smartphones are often blamed for contributing to stress and anxiety. But they may be an effective tool for improving mental health, too. Meditation apps such as Calm and Headspace provide users with soothing audio, guided meditations and breathing exercises designed to improve mental well-being. A new paper suggests that their impact could be comparable to those of much costlier forms of in-person therapy.
Advik Shreekumar and Pierre-Luc Vautrey, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recruited 2,384 Americans from Facebook and Instagram to use Headspace. Using a set of detailed mental-health questionnaires, the authors found that, after four weeks, access to the app reduced the share of participants with moderate or severe anxiety by 13 percentage points, or 50%, compared to the control group (who were placed on a waiting list for the app). The share of participants with moderate or severe depression fell by 14 percentage points, or 47%, relative to the control group.
These results should be interpreted with caution. First, participants in the study were recruited based on their interest in trying Headspace. That resulted in a sample that was younger, more female, more educated and more left-wing than the general population. Nearly 85% of participants were women, 44% held graduate degrees and less than 3% identified as Republicans. Second, the study did not include a placebo. In clinical trials, participants are assigned to receive either the treatment or a placebo. In this study such an approach was “not easily implementable,” the authors wrote, which means the mere thought of receiving an effective treatment could have been enough to ease symptoms.
Still, the market for such apps shows no sign of slowing, having surged during the pandemic. Consumer spending on the five leading meditation apps grew by more than 25% in 2021, according to App Annie, a research firm. Consumer spending on mental-health apps is expected to reach nearly $500m in 2022, according to Deloitte, a consultancy, up from $200m in 2019.
But whether such apps have any long-term effects is still unclear. For all their potential benefits, most users lose interest in mental-health apps after only a couple of weeks. Messrs Shreekumar and Vautrey found that 80% of users logged into Headspace at least once during the first two weeks, averaging nearly six minutes per day. But by the fourth week, usage declined “rapidly,” according to the authors. Just half of users logged in at all between the fourth and eight week and only a tenth did so at least once every three days.
