
Lucy Nicholson/REUTERS
There’s a little too much wishful thinking about mindfulness, and it is skewing how researchers report their studies of the technique.
Researchers at McGill University analysed 124 published trials of mindfulness as a mental-health treatment, and found that scientists reported positive findings 60% more often than is statistically likely. The team also examined another 21 trials that were registered with databases such as ClinicalTrials.gov; of these, 62% were unpublished 30 months after they finished. The findings hint that negative results are going unpublished.