Dataset for "Mindfulness for voices: An experimental analogue study"

Improving treatments for people who hear negative voices (e.g. with threatening or hostile content) is a clinical priority as they can cause high levels of distress and impairment to people in their everyday life. We know that people who are less distressed by voices tend to report using a more mindful response style (e.g. letting the voices come and go in their own time) compared to people who are more distressed by voices. This was the first experimental study to directly test the effect of instructing people to use a mindful acceptance response style compared to an attentional avoidance response style using an established voice simulation paradigm. The results of the study showed that adherence to the response style people were instructed to adopt was low, meaning that it was not possible to conclude whether training people to respond with a mindful response style to voices might result in less distress and anxiety and better cognitive functioning compared to an avoidant response style.

This dataset supports the paper "Mindfulness for voices: An experimental analogue study of the effect of manipulating response style to simulated voices in a non-clinical population". It contains measures related to the Southampton Mindfulness Questionnaire and Toronto Mindfulness Scale; measures of average response time and proportion of correct responses; measures of baseline and post-test anxiety and distress, participants' self-report of response style, and perceived awareness of the research hypothesis; and demographic information about the participants. Supporting the dataset are the experimental protocol, scripts and recordings for induction exercises, the codebook and the R analysis script.