Mindfulness
October 1, 2023
Christine D Wilson-Mendenhall, John D. Dunne, Richard J. Davidson
Contemplative interventions designed to cultivate compassion are receiving increasing empirical attention. Accumulating evidence suggests that these interventions bolster prosocial motivation and warmth towards others. Less is known about how these practices impact compassion in everyday life. Here we consider one mechanistic pathway through which compassion practices may impact perception and...
npj Mental Health Research
April 18, 2023
Zishan Jiwani, Raquel G Tatar, Cortland J. Dahl et al.
Digital interventions have the potential to alleviate mental health disparities for marginalized and minoritized communities. The current study examined whether disparities in access and utilization of meditation in the United States (US) were reduced for a freely available meditation app. We analyzed demographic and usage data from US-based users of the Healthy Minds Program (HMP; N = 66,482)...
Frontiers in Psychology
2021
Christine D Wilson-Mendenhall, John D. Dunne
An emerging focus in affective science is the expertise that underlies healthy emotionality. A growing literature highlights emotional granularity - the ability to make fine-grained distinctions in one's affective feelings - as an important skill. Cross-sectional evidence indicating the benefits of emotional granularity raises the question of how emotional granularity might be intentionally...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
December 7, 2020
Cortland J. Dahl, Christine D Wilson-Mendenhall, Richard J. Davidson
Research indicates that core dimensions of psychological well-being can be cultivated through intentional mental training. Despite growing research in this area and an increasing number of interventions designed to improve psychological well-being, the field lacks a unifying framework that clarifies the dimensions of human flourishing that can be cultivated. Here, we integrate evidence from...
JMIR Mental Health
November 27, 2020
Simon B. Goldberg, Ted Imhoff‐Smith, Daniel M. Bolt et al.
104 citations
BACKGROUND: A growing number of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) suggest psychological benefits associated with meditation training delivered via mobile health. However, research in this area has primarily focused on mindfulness, only one of many meditative techniques. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of 2 versions of a self-guided, smartphone-based meditation app-the...
August 28, 2020
Simon B. Goldberg, Ted Imhoff‐Smith, Daniel M. Bolt et al.
BACKGROUND A growing number of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) suggest psychological benefits associated with meditation training delivered via mobile health. However, research in this area has primarily focused on mindfulness, only one of many meditative techniques. OBJECTIVE This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of 2 versions of a self-guided, smartphone-based meditation app—the...
August 9, 2017
S. Bauer-Wu, A. Butler, Justin K. Rajendra et al.
According to constructivist theories of emotion, members of different populations experience emotion differently as a result of assembling different neural resources to produce it. To test this prediction, we sampled individuals from three populations (experienced meditators, cancer survivors, matched controls) and used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess their neural...
Neuroimage
January 2, 2012
Wendy Hasenkamp, Christine D Wilson-Mendenhall, Erica Duncan et al.
Studies have suggested that the default mode network is active during mind wandering, which is often experienced intermittently during sustained attention tasks. Conversely, an anticorrelated task-positive network is thought to subserve various forms of attentional processing. Understanding how these two systems work together is central for understanding many forms of optimal and sub-optimal...