Although hospital chaplains play a critical role in delivering emotional and spiritual care to a broad range of both religious and non-religious patients, there is remarkably little research on the best-practices of chaplaincy training or “active ingredients” of chaplain spiritual consults. CBCT® (Cognitively-Based Compassion Training) is a secularized compassion meditation program that improves empathic accuracy …
The Mind & Life 2020 Contemplative Research Conference is online November 5-8, 2020. The virtual conference is an international convening for rigorous interdisciplinary investigation of contemplative practices and programs in diverse contexts. The conference will feature plenary sessions and concurrent symposia on a diverse range of topics and best practices within contemplative research, including basic research, clinical studies, cultural and philosophical analyses, and education.
As part of NCCIH’s current strategic plan, there is a strong focus on advancing fundamental science of the mechanisms by which mind-and-body approaches affect health, resiliency and well-being. Additionally, NCCIH has a robust clinical research program to assess the safety and efficacy/effectiveness of a range of mind-and-body approaches for treatment and/or management of care for …
Educators and philosophers have pointed to the importance of quality education for building a peaceful world. This requires the intentional cultivation of wholesome school environments where students feel supported and encouraged to thrive. However, increasing demands on teachers have resulted in high levels of stress and burnout, which can hinder their sustained commitment to teach …
Meaning–making is fundamental to biological survival, insofar as hedonic valuation (i.e., “is this good for me, or bad for me?”) drives behavior to facilitate homeostatic goal attainment. Yet, the dysregulation of hedonic value is at the root of many of the most pressing maladies afflicting modern society, including addiction, stress, and chronic pain. For instance, …
Pain is a multidimensional experience that involves interacting sensory, cognitive, and affective factors, rendering the treatment of chronic pain challenging and financially burdensome. The widespread use of opioids to treat chronic pain has led to an opioid epidemic characterized by exponential growth in opioid misuse and addiction. The staggering statistics related to opioid use highlight …
A focus on cultural ecology—how human actions or practices shape the physical, social, and mental landscapes in which we grow up and live—permits one to track the biocultural dynamics through which culture gets “under the skin.” Such embodiment is driven by adaptive context-expectant features of human development and biology that operate through experience-contingent, epigenetic, time-sensitive, …
This lecture will review salient examples of social connectivity — in mood, mind states, and physiology. We will explore how different states or tendencies — biases toward threat appraisals, mind wandering, and engagement in the present, are related to social, psychological, and biological well being. Elissa Epel will focus more deeply on social influences on …
In the last decades, plasticity research has suggested that training of mental capacities such as attention, mindfulness and compassion is effective and leads to positive changes in socio-affective and cognitive functions. Tania Singer will show first results of the ReSource Project, a large-scale multi-methodological one-year secular mental training program in which participants were trained in …
High-quality social relationships help us live longer, happier and healthier lives — facts that hold true, as far as anyone knows, regardless of geography or culture. Although links between relationships and health have been observed for decades (if not millennia), the mechanisms responsible for them remain speculative. In this talk, Jim Coan will first describe …
