After the daily reporting phase ended, the final (T2) surveybecame available online. Participants visited our website a finaltime and completed the same measures as at T1, followed by a dayreconstruction (described below) and a demographics question-naire. After data collection was completed, participants receiveddebriefing information explaining more about the details of thestudy.2 Approximately 2 months later, meditation classes beganfor the waitlist control group. No further data were collected at thattime

responded to the initial (T1) survey (described below).Participants learned their group assignment (meditation workshopor waitlist control) only after completing the T1 survey

Demographic information is presented in Table 1. The compo-sitions of the initial and completer samples were similar: Mostparticipants were female, most had bachelor’s or master’s degrees,and the average age was 41 years

The meditation training involved six 60-minute group sessions(held over 7 weeks, because of religious holidays) with 20 –30participants per group. All sessions were led by a stress-management specialist (Sandra M. Finkel) with extensive experi-ence practicing and teaching LKM. The median number of ses-sions attended was five (M
4.3, SD
1.8). At the first session,participants were given a CD that included three guided medita-tions of increasing scope, led by the workshop instructor. DuringWeek 1, participants practiced a meditation directing love andcompassion toward themselves. During Week 2, the meditationadded loved ones. During subsequent weeks, the meditation builtfrom self, to loved ones, to acquaintances, to strangers, and finally,to all living beings. The first meditation lasted 15 min, and thefinal one lasted 22 min.

the experiment was just over 10 weeks. In thefuture, it will be important to investigate the extent to which theresources endure beyond the end of the intervention or into periods ofheightened stress or negative emotions.

thesample was predominantly White, educated, and motivated for self-change. Mindfulness-based programs have shown widespread emo-tional and medical benefits in diverse populations and for individualswithout prior interest in meditation (Kabat-Zinn, 1990), and it will beimportant to determine whether the same holds true for LKM

The practice of LKM led to shifts in people’sdaily experiences of a wide range of positive emotions, includinglove, joy, gratitude, contentment, hope, pride, interest, amusement,and awe. These increases in positive emotions were evident bothwithin the trajectories of change in daily emotions over the span of 9weeks and within a detailed analysis of a given morning 2 weeks afterformal training ended. These shifts in positive emotions took time toappear and were not large in magnitude, but over the course of 9weeks, they were linked to increases in a variety of personal re-sources, including mindful attention, self-acceptance, positive rela-tions with others, and good physical health. Moreover, these gains inpersonal resources were consequential: They enabled people to be-come more satisfied with their lives and to experience fewer symp-toms of depression. Simply put, by elevating daily experiences ofpositive emotions, the practice of LKM led to long-term gains thatmade genuine differences in people’s lives.

DRM (Kahneman et al., 2004) to assess partici-pants’ time-varying emotion experiences during a specific day.Because of time constraints, we limited our assessment to themorning of the targeted day. We asked participants to divide theirmorning—from the time they awoke until they completedlunch—into a continuous series of episodes and to provide adescriptive label for each episode. We allowed a maximum of10 episodes. Thereafter, participants revisited each labeled ep-isode to provide ratings from 0 (not at all) to 4 (extremely) forthe emotion adjectives from the mDES, as described above(Fredrickson et al., 2003)

their strongest experience of each of 19 specific emotions on a4-point scale (0
not at all, 4
extremely). The emotionslisted were amusement, anger, awe, compassion, contempt,contentment, disgust, embarrassment, gratitude, hope, joy, in-terest, love, pride, guilt, sadness, shame, fear, and surprise.Participants also reported whether they had engaged in “medi-tation, prayer, or solo spiritual activity” since the last time theyfilled out the survey (not necessarily the same 24-hr time spanas mDES responses). Both meditation and waitlist participantsresponded to these questions.

During daily reports, participants completed the ModifiedDifferential Emotions Scale (mDES; Fredrickson et al., 2003)