Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
May 24, 2018
Alexandra Martelli, David Chester, Kirk Warren Brown et al.
31 citations
Mindfulness—receptive attentiveness to present-moment experience—may buffer the distress of social rejection. In a functional MRI study, participants reported their trait mindfulness, then played Cyberball, a social rejection game. Those higher in mindfulness reported less distress during rejection. This effect was mediated by lower activation in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region linked to inhibiting negative affect. Mindfulness also correlated with weaker functional connectivity between that region and the amygdala and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, areas involved in generating social distress. The findings suggest mindfulness may aid coping with rejection by not over-activating top-down regulatory mechanisms, potentially fostering more effective long-term emotion regulation.
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
July 23, 2021
Hadley Rahrig, James M. Bjork, Camila Tirado et al.
17 citations
Reactive aggression, a hostile response to perceived threat, has been linked to emotion regulation failures. A pilot study compared two weeks of mindfulness training (MT) to active coping training (CT) in healthy adults, using fMRI during a retaliatory aggression task. The groups did not differ in aggression levels. However, MT participants showed greater ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity during punishment events, while CT participants showed greater dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) activity when deciding retaliation. The findings suggest mindfulness and cognitive control training may regulate aggression through different neural circuits at different stages of provocation.
Research Square
July 4, 2025
Erika Blair, David Chester
People often rely on others to help manage their emotions, a process called interpersonal emotion regulation (IER), while mindfulness involves turning inward to regulate emotions. A longitudinal study of 469 undergraduates across three waves, each about 20 days apart, examined how these strategies relate to each other and to aggression. Contrary to predictions, individuals who were generally more mindful engaged in less IER over time. However, when participants were more mindful than their own average, they subsequently used more IER. Neither mindfulness nor IER consistently predicted aggressive behavior. The inverse relationship between these effective regulatory approaches raises questions about trade-offs between their costs and benefits.
October 18, 2023
Hadley Rahrig, Liangsuo Ma, Kirk Warren Brown et al.
preprint
A brief mindfulness induction altered functional brain networks in intimate partner dyads, reducing coherence within the Default Mode Network and increasing connectivity within the Frontoparietal Control and Salience Networks, while decoupling primary visual and attention-linked networks. However, these neural changes did not translate into reduced intimate partner aggression, and aggression was broadly unassociated with any network indices. The findings suggest that minimal doses of focused attention meditation can produce transient changes in large-scale brain networks, but their implications for aggressive behavior remain uncertain.
Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience
December 1, 2023
Hadley Rahrig, Liangsuo Ma, Kirk Warren Brown et al.
A brief mindfulness induction—a single session of focused attention meditation—altered large-scale brain networks in intimate partner dyads. In 100 participants (50 couples), mindfulness instruction reduced coherence within the Default Mode Network and increased connectivity in the Frontoparietal Control and Salience Networks, while decoupling visual and attention-linked networks. However, these neural changes did not translate into reduced intimate partner aggression, and aggression was unrelated to any network measures. The results suggest that minimal doses of mindfulness can produce transient brain network changes, but their behavioral implications for aggression remain unclear.
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
February 21, 2020
Klee Irwin, Marcelo Amaral, David Chester
The paper proposes a self-simulation hypothesis, a modification of the simulation hypothesis, in which the physical universe is a mental self-simulation structured as a strange loop. This model is presented as one of a class of possible code-theoretic quantum gravity models that obey the principle of efficient language axiom. The hypothesis leads to ontological interpretations of quantum mechanics and implies an informational arrow of time.