Mindfulness and meditation are increasingly used in clinical practice to treat conditions such as depression, anxiety and addiction. However, the fundamental mechanisms underlying these practices are not yet well-known and theoretical frameworks are sparse. Two important explanatory mechanisms that will be considered in this workshop are sticky thinking (cognitive fusion) and the sense of self. …
Continue reading “Mechanisms of Meditation and Consequences for Clinical Practice”
This Think Tank will convene a team of teaching and mindfulness experts to explore the science, the benefits, and potential risks of using mindfulness as an anti-oppressive pedagogy—an approach that helps students recognize the ways that most people are variously privileged and oppressed, understanding how both relations perpetuate suffering for others and for oneself. The …
We aim to develop a set of recommended “core measures” for mindfulness-based intervention research that can strengthen individual studies and facilitate pooled data analyses and meta-analyses. While most studies require study specific outcome measures, there are domains that are appropriate to measure across studies. These includes self-report measures of important common outcomes (e.g. stress and …
Contemplative teachings highlight the benefit of mindfulness practice to the practitioner and to those with whom they interact, yet very few studies on meditation to date have explored whether meditation training improves social interactions and relationships. Examining effects on emotion regulation in social contexts may be key to understanding meditation’s social consequences, for at least …
The proposed research aims to derive individual neural characteristics from data-driven analysis of resting state fMRI to predict the effectiveness of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training on fear extinction and stress reduction. This project aims to capture the individual variability in the amplitudes of spontaneous brain activity and neural network properties, and relate such variability …
In previous years, scientists documented many personal benefits resulting from mindfulness- and compassion-based meditation, including increases in health. There was less known, however, regarding the social and relational benefits of meditation. Thus, this project examined whether mindfulness and compassion-based meditation training increased the likelihood that people would act to relieve the suffering of others in …
The PI will recruit a mentor teacher (with a minimum of 5 years of teaching experience and 1 year of practicing mindfulness) from a school where at least 10 classroom teachers are willing to be assigned to a mindfulness or control condition. The mentor teacher will collect data from computerized measures on attention and working …
We will assess if mindfulness-meditation reduces pain above and beyond the indirect effects associated with these constructs by employing robust comparison conditions (i.e., placebo conditioning, active control intervention). The study under proposed fellowship will provide unique insight into the brain mechanisms supporting modulation of pain by mindfulness meditation and placebo conditioning, an important step in …
Elevated stress can exacerbate cancer symptom severity, and after completion of primary cancer treatments, many individuals continue to have significant distress. Mindfulness-Based Cancer Recovery (MBCR) is an 8-week group psychosocial intervention consisting of training in mindfulness meditation and yoga designed to mitigate stress, pain, and chronic illness. Efficacy research shows face-to-face (F2F) MBCR programs have …
Continue reading “The eCALM Study: eTherapy for Cancer AppLying Mindfulness”
A growing body of research implicates meditation and mindfulness training for the adaptive training of executive and affective function. While these findings are exciting, it is surprising that far less attention has been paid to the neurophenomenological aspects of meditation practice. We set out to investigate the role of meta-cognitive awareness in mediating affective and …
