Psychosomatic Medicine
July 1, 2007
J. David Creswell, Baldwin M. Way, Naomi I. Eisenberger et al.
840 citations
People who are naturally more mindful show distinct brain activity when labeling emotional facial expressions. During an affect labeling task, higher dispositional mindfulness was linked to greater activation in prefrontal cortical regions and reduced activity in the amygdala. Strong negative correlations between prefrontal cortex and right amygdala responses appeared only in those with high mindfulness, suggesting that mindful individuals may better regulate negative emotions through cognitive control. This pattern points to a possible neurocognitive mechanism—enhanced prefrontal regulation of affect via labeling—that could explain how mindfulness meditation reduces negative affect and improves health.
Emotion
January 1, 2010
Baldwin M. Way, J. David Creswell, Naomi I. Eisenberger et al.
212 citations
Among 27 normal young adults, dispositional mindfulness was negatively correlated with resting neural activity in self-referential processing areas and in the amygdala bilaterally, whereas depressive symptomatology was positively correlated with resting activity in similar areas, including the right amygdala. During viewing of negative emotional faces, amygdala reactivity was positively correlated with depressive symptoms and negatively correlated with mindfulness, an effect largely attributable to differences in resting activity. These findings suggest that mindfulness is linked to intrinsic neural activity and that changes in resting amygdala activity may be a mechanism through which mindfulness-based depression treatments produce therapeutic improvement.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
May 15, 2025
Matthew D. Lieberman
10 citations
Subjective conscious experience arises from effortless interpretations that feel like perceived facts, called p-interpretations, which are inherently idiosyncratic and integrate past and expected future moments into the present. Differential neural synchrony between groups suggests that parts of gestalt cortex, including the inferior parietal lobule and posterior temporal cortex, along with posterior medial cortex, track these p-interpretations. This differential synchrony may reflect each person's preexisting non-sensory representations—such as expectations, memories, and motivations—being integrated with sensory inputs to produce unique, meaning-infused immediate experiences across the stream of consciousness.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
June 9, 2026
Grace Qiyuan Miao, Ian J Lieberman, Ashley Binnquist et al.
During deep conversations, pairs of strangers feel more socially connected than during shallow ones, and this feeling is linked to increased synchrony in the default mode network (DMN) of their brains, especially in the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ). The study measured brain activity with functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in 70 stranger dyads. DMN synchrony, particularly in the TPJ, appears to help strangers 'see eye-to-eye' and feel connected during face-to-face interactions.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
September 17, 2018
Yoona Kang, N. Cooper, Prateekshit Pandey et al.
Activating a self-transcendent mindset—focusing on others' well-being through reflecting on values or making positive wishes—increased activity in brain regions linked to positive valuation and reward. Among 220 sedentary adults, those primed with self-transcendence before health messages showed greater objectively measured increases in physical activity over the following month. During message exposure, self-transcendence was associated with increased activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex subregions involved in self-related processing and positive valuation, which predicted later decreases in sedentary behavior. The findings suggest that a positive, other-focused mindset can reduce defensiveness and increase receptivity to health information, promoting behavior change.
March 22, 2012
Matthew D. Lieberman
The psychological zombie hypothesis proposes that mental operations usually accompanied by conscious awareness can occur without it, suggesting that conscious awareness is superfluous for generating behaviors and judgments. This hypothesis, distinct from the philosophical zombie thought experiment, posits an 'inner-zombie' whose work does not depend on awareness. The chapter examines this emerging idea within psychology as a challenge to assumptions about the causal role of consciousness.