Elective course - Mindfulness: theory & practice

This course will deal with the concept of mindfulness. The concept of mindfulness is gaining popularity with academic psychology as well as in mainstream psychology. Mindfulness is being used and applied in a broader range of psychological programs and interventions and as such it becomes an increasing important for professional psychologists to understand and comprehend the term.

As such this course aims to qualify the students’ knowledge of mindfulness and enable them to understand mindfulness within a wider range of psychological contexts. This is done from a critical scientific basis.

The course will introduce mindfulness as a psychological construct, herein present and discuss ways to understand and describe the concept. Theoretical perspectives that seeks to illuminate the origin, development, utility, potential and limitations of mindfulness will be presented.

Empirical studies that exemplifies the aforementioned, will continuously work to demonstrate different operationalizations and effects of mindfulness interventions. These studies will primarily be clinical and cognitive studies.

In addition, the course will contain a smaller practical part, where select mindfulness exercises will be exemplified. As such the course alsomaims to give the students a “1-1” experience and practice-based understanding of working with mindfulness.