A Review of Mindfulness Improves Decision Making and Future Prospects

Abstract

With the popularity of mindfulness training among different groups of people, more and more attention has been paid to the positive role of mindfulness. In particular, the improvement of mindfulness on decision-making has been respected by the elite management and practitioners in different industries. There are also different forms of experimental paradigms for different types of decision-making behaviors in research methods. Both behavioral evidence and imaging evidence show that mindfulness training can improve decision-making, both under the social and non-social conditions. Mindfulness training was predominantly driven by an “emotional” system, manifested by an active medial prefrontal cortex, whereas the latter was not dominated by a “rational” system of decision-making processes; on the contrary, posterior insular and thalamic regions with emotional function were more active. Therefore, the emotional system throughout the mindset training affects the whole process of decision-making. In addition, mindfulness affects other possible factors such as attention, compassion, and cognitive control in the decision-making process. At last, based on the existing research deficiencies, this paper analyzed future prospects from the aspects of research methods, research contents and theoretical construction, in order to provide references for future research in this field.