Sham meditation procedures necessarily involve deception of participants and the ethicality of this in clinical trials is open to dispute. Further, this kind of strategy can be logistically challenging and there is always a risk that the deception might be uncovered, thereby immediately invalidating the entire study.
The fact that some techniques elicit detectable effects when [...]
It may not be practically possible to devise and implement an ideal control method for meditation trials, nevertheless it is important to select a strategy that approximates that ideal.
The bare minimum criteria for a control process in meditation research should therefore be:
• First, high face validity as a therapeutic/stress management intervention in its own right. It [...]
Examining the studies in the review ”Does Meditation Have a Specific Effect? A Systematic Experimental Evaluation of a Mental silence Orientated Definition”, control methods were presumptively categorized according to their face-validity into low, moderate or high face validity categories.
The low face-validity controls used strategies that were:
Passive and unstructured: Participants were involved in minimal or no activity [...]
Control methods in meditation trials can be positioned on a spectrum based on their varying ability to elicit non-specific effects. At the low face validity end are those that are mostly passive and implausible (such as “waiting list”) and therefore unlikely to control for non-specific factors, while at the other extreme are those that are [...]
A general reading of the total literature makes it obvious that method validity is the major challenge to meditation research. More specifically, the main problems are: first, the use of appropriate control strategies to exclude non-specific effects (more widely known as the “placebo effect”), second, the need for randomization and other strategies to eliminate bias [...]
In this excerpt from his thesis, Dr Manocha highlights the potential problems expectancy can produce in research.
“Smith (1976) conducted a study in which he specifically controlled for expectancy of relief and found that non-meditators and meditators experienced the same degree of improvement within the same categories of expectancy, suggesting that a substantial proportion of the [...]
Dr Manocha explains why he categorised the control methods used to examine meditation by their validity in his research.
“Control methods in meditation trials can be positioned on a spectrum based on their varying ability to elicit non-specific effects. At the low face validity end are those that are mostly passive and implausible (such as “waiting [...]