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When Does Yoga Work? Long Term and Short Term Effects of Yoga Intervention among Pre-adolescent Children

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Abstract

In this research, pre-adolescent children of two city schools were randomly assigned to three conditions of a systematic yoga intervention, a non-yogic intervention and a time lagged comparison group intervention. Three assessments at baseline, three months and six months were done on a sample of 178 school children of class fifth and sixth. The outcome variables were anthropometric, cognitive, personality variables and self reported class room behaviours. Various directional hypotheses based on review of literature were tested. In particular, to understand the short term and long term effects of yoga intervention on children, repeated measures analysis and discriminant function analysis was used, which is discussed in the present paper. Results reveal that the effect of yoga interventions emerge only at long term, where the yoga group is clearly ahead of the non-yogic and time -lagged group on a cluster of factors termed as “positive health”. Implications are discussed.

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Correspondence to Shilpa Ashok Pandit.

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Pandit, S.A., Satish, L. When Does Yoga Work? Long Term and Short Term Effects of Yoga Intervention among Pre-adolescent Children. Psychol Stud 59, 153–165 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-013-0209-7

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