PLoS One
May 6, 2015
Elena Antonova, Paul Chadwick, Veena Kumari
41 citations
Intensive mindfulness practice attenuates habituation of the acoustic startle reflex, meaning experienced meditators continue to respond strongly to repeated startling sounds rather than tuning them out. Moderate practice, however, enhances habituation, suggesting a non-linear effect of practice intensity. The study measured eye-blink muscle responses to 36 loud noises in three groups: meditation-naïve, moderate practice, and intensive practice. Only the intensive practice group showed reduced habituation across the entire experiment. Greater practice intensity correlated with slower habituation in the intensive group. The effect is modest and provides tentative evidence that intensive mindfulness may alter automatic sensory processing.
Mindfulness
July 3, 2026
Eman AlBedah, Vuokko Wallace, Paul Chadwick
Muslims who have taken mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) and the teachers who deliver those interventions report initial tensions and worries about whether secular mindfulness conflicts with Islam or Muslim cultures. Over time, many participants found that mindfulness training deepened their spirituality and sense of common humanity, despite a lack of evidence-based guidelines for integrating the two. The study identifies four themes: tensions between mindfulness and Islam or culture; confusion over what is secular versus Islamic; developing trust in the process and teachers; and discoveries of enhanced connectedness and spirituality. Teachers and graduates made evolving assumptions and decisions as they progressed through MBI programs.
Behavior therapy
January 1, 2023
Lyn Ellett, Jessica Kingston, Eryna Tarant et al.
People with persecutory delusions organize their self-concept differently than healthy individuals, holding more negative self-attributes and keeping positive and negative traits in separate mental compartments. In Study 1, 27 individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum diagnoses and current persecutory delusions showed greater compartmentalization, a higher proportion of negative attributes, and more importance assigned to negative self-aspects compared with 47 healthy controls. In Study 2, the same clinical group completed a card-sorting task before and after 12 weeks of mindfulness-based therapy or treatment-as-usual. Large effect sizes indicated reductions in compartmentalization and proportion of negative attributes following mindfulness therapy, though no link emerged between delusion severity and self-structure. The findings suggest self-structure can change with psychological therapy.
Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy
July 1, 2009
Paul Chadwick, Stephanie Hughes, Daphne Russell et al.
Group-based mindfulness therapy for people with current distressing psychotic experiences is feasible to evaluate in a randomized trial, but the primary analysis found no significant differences between those who received the therapy and those on a waiting list. Secondary analyses combining both groups showed significant improvement in clinical functioning and mindfulness of distressing thoughts and images after training, but not for voices. The study included 22 participants randomly assigned to twice-weekly mindfulness sessions for 5 weeks plus home practice, followed by 5 weeks of home practice, or to a waiting list.
Emilia Winnebeck, Maria Fißler, Matti Gärtner et al.
A brief mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) of three individual sessions plus regular home practice reduced depression symptoms more than a control condition with psycho-education and rest in 74 patients with chronic or recurrent depression. Only the MBI group showed increases in mindfulness and decreases in ruminative tendencies and cognitive reactivity. The results support a stress-buffering role for mindfulness and indicate that even short, targeted mindfulness training can alleviate symptoms in acutely depressed patients with a long-term history.