Effect of app-based mindfulness on extinction recall - a 7T-fMRI study.
Scientific Reports March 25, 2026 Johannes Björkstrand, Emil Olsson, Oisín Hugh Clancy et al.
Four weeks of app-based mindfulness meditation enhanced fear extinction recall in healthy adults, reducing physiological and neural threat responses to extinguished cues. Mindfulness decreased activation in subcortical threat-processing regions (amygdala, striatum, supplementary motor area) without increasing cognitive control areas, suggesting direct modulation of fear circuits rather than top-down inhibition. This pattern indicates mindfulness may improve safety memory retrieval through implicit emotion regulation, offering preliminary neurobiological evidence for optimizing treatments for fear-based disorders. Replication in clinical samples is needed.