I was looking at how meditation affects the sleeping brain. The results were paradoxical, in that the more a person meditates, the better they report sleeping, but the worse they sleep on pretty much any objective measure of worse (as in, measured by polysomnography). I think this points to how meditation creates 24-hour vigilance and …
Continue reading “The effect of mindfulness meditation on sleep electrophysiology and duration”
Psychological well-being is known to be related to factors of affective chronometry, in particular, the ability to sustain positive responses (hedonic sustainability) and the ability to rapidly recover from negative responses. Both of these are under the phenomenological umbrella of “emotion regulation” and the methodological umbrella of “affective chronometry”. Here we focus on recovery from …
Continue reading “Hedonic sustainability in the BOLD response to selfish and altruistic rewards”
We evaluated the effects of mindfulness on impulsivity during smoking cessation. Current methods for self-reporting formal mindfulness practice are inaccurate, so we used accelerometer-based watches to monitor formal mindfulness practice testing. In this study, we attempted to replicate the Yale trial comparing Mindfulness Training (MT) to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for smoking cessation. We randomized …
This project will examine how mindfulness training affects dispositional mindfulness, parental monitoring, a child’s effortful control of attention, and the quality of the parent-child relationship. In addition to how changes in these variables are related to changes in problem behavior. Forty families (with children ages 10-12) will be recruited from a Northwestern city, and half …
Continue reading “Mindfulness training for parents and children”
We conducted a study to see how a very short mindfulness training would affect smokers who were trying to quit. We wanted to know whether <20 minutes of instruction would affect peoples’ cigarette cravings and what the brain mechanisms might be. In this study, we invited smokers who were about to participate in a mindfulness-based …
Attentional function is one possible mechanism underlying meditation’s impact on stress and psychopathology, but few studies examine this newly discovered factor. Attentional allocation, in the context of cognitive and emotional self-regulation, may underlie changes observed following meditation training and practice. Additionally, meditation’s potential to ameliorate subjective and biochemical reactions to an acute stressor remains unexplored. …
A compassionate and prosocial attitude can be cultivated through loving-kindness (metta) meditation. The proposed study aims to elucidate how brain activity, prosocial behaviour and prosocial attitudes in novice meditators change with a brief loving-kindness meditation training. Furthermore, the benefits of using neurofeedback to learn metta meditation strategies will be investigated. Twenty female participants will receive …
Despite the burgeoning of mindfulness research, it remains unclear which components of mindfulness are directly related to symptom reduction. Furthermore, little is known about the experience of daily life mindfulness or the relationship between stress regulation and mindfulness in insomnia patients. Using a neurovisceral integration model of self-regulation, the proposed study seeks to examine the …
This study focused on brain dynamics changes in the meditative state (short-term changes) and their possible development into trait (long-term changes), in an EEG data set recorded from a group of Mindfulness Meditators (MM, n=36) with varying expertise, a group of transcendental meditators (TM, n=12), and suitable controls. We applied two measures: (a) a functional …
Continue reading “Meditation and nonlinear neurodynamics: From state to trait”
Many individuals with cancer report problems achieving an adequate and restorative sleep. This difficulty is due in part to the cognitive and somatic arousal that can accompany a stressful life experience. Unfortunately, chronic sleep deprivation is linked to poor physical and psychological health and an increased risk of mortality. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) …
