Analysis of a Newspaper Article

Analysis of A newspaper Article Assignment

Newspaper and magazine articles are used as a source of information to the public for all sorts of things including medical information. Many times they report statistical information or results without explaining the methods used to come to their conclusions. In this paper we will examine an article and discuss the purpose of the study, research methodology and statistical procedures used, and the results and the appropriateness of the results.

Purpose of the study

Chosen is an article titled “Meditation can wish you well, study says” by Amanda Gardner. Gardner discusses a study by doctors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. According to Gardner’s article “The main research question was to see whether some positive qualities such as loving-kindness and compassion or, in general, pro-social altruistic behavior, can be understood as skills and can be trained” (Gardner, 2008).

Research methodology and statistical procedures used

According to Antoine Lutz, an associate scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the study “Potentially one can train oneself to behave in a way which is more benevolent and altruistic” (Gardner, 2008).

The study group involved 32 people. 16 of them were Tibetan monks and lay practitioners (experts). The “expert mediators have more than 10,000 hours of practice in Buddhist meditation and are perceived in their communities as embodying qualities of compassion” (Lutz et al., 2008). They were compared with age and gender-matched novices (control group), who had a interest in learning to meditate. They had no experience with meditation except for receiving meditation instructions for the same practice performed by the experts one week prior to the study.

Gardner (2008), states in her article that the participants were hooked up to a MRI while meditating and while not meditating. They were exposed to sounds to produce responses such as the sound of a distressed woman, the sound of a baby laughing, and the sound of background noise from a restaurant.

“Far the studies, individuals in the control group were instructed first to wish loved ones well –being and freedom from pain, then to wish such benefits to humankind as a whole” (Gardner, 2008).

According to the study (Lutz et al., 2008), the MRI images were collected with a GE Signa 3.0 Tesla scanner equipped with a high speed whole body gradient and a whole head transmit receive quadrature birdcage headcoil.

Study results and findings

According to Lutz (2008), the hypothesis was that “Concern for others cultivated during this form of meditation enhances affective processing, in particular in response to sounds of distress, and that this response to emotional sounds is modulated by the degree of meditation training” (Lutz et al., 2008).

During scanning there were no differences in the brain in response to the neutral sounds of background noise from a restaurant. They then ran a follow up 2*2*2* ANOVA using only the sound of a distressed woman (negative) and the sound of a baby laughing (positive) in voxel-wise analyses. The right insula