Psychological Assessment
April 14, 2016
Yuval Hadash, Reut Plonsker, David R. Vago et al.
69 citations
The cognitive association of present-moment subjective experience with the self, termed Experiential Self-Referential Processing (ESRP), may underlie various forms of maladaptation, while mindfulness may promote mental health by fostering Experiential Selfless Processing (ESLP), which involves processing experience without self-referentiality. A new implicit behavioral measure, the Single Experience & Self Implicit Association Test (SES-IAT), was developed to assess ESRP and ESLP of fear. In a randomized experiment with 138 adults, preliminary evidence suggested the SES-IAT measures ESLP and two forms of ESRP: identification with fear and negative self-referential evaluation of fear. ESRP and ESLP were associated with meta-awareness and key psychobehavioral processes underlying adaptation and maladaptation.
Depression and Anxiety
January 1, 2008
Marcel O Bonn-Miller, Michael J Zvolensky, Amit Bernstein et al.
29 citations
Among 149 young adult marijuana users, those who both used marijuana frequently (past 30 days) and reported using it to cope with negative emotions had the highest levels of anxious arousal, agoraphobic cognitions, and worry. This pattern held after accounting for cigarettes, alcohol, and years of marijuana use. No similar interaction was found for depressive symptoms, suggesting the link is specific to anxiety rather than depression.
Psychotherapy
April 30, 2020
Simon B. Goldberg, Adam W. Hanley, Scott A. Baldwin et al.
22 citations
Mindfulness practice time and psychological outcomes are linked on the same day, but practicing more on one day does not predict better outcomes the next day. Instead, feeling better or more mindful on a given day predicts more practice the following day. Over 12 weeks, 25 participants in a standardized mindfulness program completed daily diaries. Same-day relationships showed expected patterns: more practice was associated with higher positive affect and mindfulness and lower negative affect. However, lagged analyses found no evidence that practice time drives next-day outcomes. Post hoc analysis indicated that practice time moderated the connection between day-to-day affect, strengthening the positive affect link and weakening the negative affect link. The findings suggest that the causal direction may flow from outcome to practice time, not the reverse.
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
April 1, 2024
Yuval Hadash, Tatyana Veksler, Omer Dar et al.
8 citations
Intensive meditation retreats produce primarily pleasant peak experiences—such as deep peace or sudden insights—rather than unpleasant ones. In a preregistered study, 96 adults attending 6-day Vipassana retreats reported more pleasant peak experiences than 47 matched controls from the same meditation community. Unpleasant peak experiences did not differ significantly between groups. At two-week follow-up, both pleasant and most unpleasant peak experiences were rated as more beneficial than harmful, with a large average effect size (Cohen's d = 1.61). The findings contradict uncontrolled retrospective studies suggesting that intensive meditation training often leads to adverse experiences.
Mindfulness
September 2, 2025
Kevin Berryman, Yanli Lin, Sara W. Lazar et al.
4 citations
Personal virtues such as conscience, harmlessness, and equanimity may help scientists adhere to ethical principles like accountability and objectivity, but this connection is underexplored. Cultivating mindful ethical virtues through meditation could strengthen these personal traits, bridging the gap between external ethical frameworks and internal motivations for scientific conduct. A framework mapping this conceptual alignment is outlined, and Mindfulness-Based Ethical Development Interventions (MBED) are proposed as a non-sectarian approach to training ethical behaviors in the scientific community. The paper calls for meta-scientific initiatives that prioritize developing undeveloped ethical virtues among scientists.
Psychopharmacology
January 18, 2025
Sharon R. Sznitman, Yoel A Behar, Sheila Daniela Dicker-Oren et al.
3 citations
In a non-clinical sample of 36 adults attending a 4-day ayahuasca retreat, positive affect and mindfulness skills improved while negative affect decreased in the days following the retreat compared to before. Acute experiences such as feelings of transcendence, emotional breakthrough, and challenging experiences predicted greater positive affect afterward, but none of these acute experiences were linked to improvements in negative affect or mindfulness. No participants showed clinically significant adverse responses, and only 5.5% showed some degree of potentially clinically significant deterioration in affect. The findings suggest ayahuasca may improve mood and mindfulness, with certain acute experiences contributing specifically to increased positive affect.
JMIR Mental Health
June 12, 2026
Polina Beloborodova, Lillian M. Smith, Kevin M. Riordan et al.
About 28% of distressed college students and 10% of distressed US adults reported at least one adverse experience during a digital meditation program, but rates did not differ between those who completed guided meditations and those who did not, suggesting the experiences were not caused by meditation itself. Higher baseline depression, anxiety, loneliness, experiential avoidance, and perceived barriers to meditation predicted more adverse experiences. Among those reporting adverse experiences, roughly 90% were glad to have learned to meditate. Participants used diverse coping strategies, often drawing on skills taught in the program. The findings indicate that adverse experiences during meditation training may reflect preexisting distress rather than iatrogenic harm.
August 31, 2025
Amit Bernstein, Noga Aviad, Yuval Hadash et al.
preprint
Research on mindfulness meditation has largely relied on reductionist decomposition, which isolates discrete components and mechanisms but fails to capture how change emerges from continuous, nonlinear, and recursive interactions across multiple timescales. Dynamical Systems (DS) theory and methods offer a powerful framework to address this gap. A DS organizational framework structured around complex interaction dynamics, nonlinear causality, and multiscale temporal dynamics can inform theory-building, empirical research, and intervention science. Leading psychological and neuroscientific theories align with DS theory, unlike much empirical research. Future directions include developing formal DS models, collecting high-dimensional multiscale data, and using analytic tools for complex dynamical change.
July 31, 2023
Yuval Hadash, Omer Dar, Iftach Amir et al.
preprint
Decades of research on how mindfulness training affects attention have produced mixed results. To explain these findings, the Mindfulness Internal Attention (MIA) framework proposes that mindfulness primarily trains internal attention—processes focused on internally generated experiences like bodily sensations and thoughts. These internal attentional skills then generalize to late-stage external processes that handle abstracted information, such as inhibitory control and working memory updating. However, mindfulness training is unlikely to affect early-stage external processes that handle raw sensory input, like alerting or orienting to visual stimuli. Internal attention is proposed as essential for key mindfulness benefits like decentering and acceptance. A critical review of empirical findings supports this framework.
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy
April 29, 2026
Yuval Hadash, Omer Dar, Romi Oren-Schwartz et al.
A 6-day intensive mindfulness meditation retreat led to significant improvements in well-being, negative affect, perseverative thinking, brooding rumination, and depression symptoms at a 2-week follow-up compared to matched controls, with effect sizes comparable to longer 8-week mindfulness programs. Effects on positive affect, emotion regulation, and anxiety symptoms were not significant. Rates of reliable deterioration in mental health were equal or lower among retreat participants than controls, including among those with clinically elevated depression or anxiety. The findings suggest that such retreats are safe and effective, even for clinically vulnerable adults.
Annual Review of Psychology
January 1, 2026
Yuval Hadash, Omer Dar, Iftach Amir et al.
A new framework, the Mindfulness Internal Attention (MIA) framework, proposes that mindfulness training primarily targets internal attention—processes operating on internally generated or stored information—rather than early-stage external attention. The framework reviews evidence suggesting that mindfulness training affects executive functions and working memory shared between internal and late-stage external attention, but does not affect early-stage external attention processes that do not share cognitive resources with internal attention. This account reconciles the paradoxical disparity between theoretical predictions and mixed empirical findings from over two decades of research on attention and mindfulness.
The American psychologist
January 1, 2026
Amit Bernstein, Noga Aviad, Yuval Hadash et al.
Mindfulness meditation research has largely used reductionist methods that isolate individual components and mechanisms, which is ill-suited for studying how change emerges from continuous, nonlinear, and recursive interactions across multiple timescales. Dynamical systems theory and methods offer a powerful alternative framework. The authors propose an organizational framework structured around complex interaction dynamics, nonlinear causality, and multiscale temporal dynamics. They examine how leading psychological and neuroscientific theories align with dynamical systems theory, unlike most empirical research. Future directions include developing formal dynamical systems theory and computational models, collecting high-dimensional multiscale data, and using analytic tools that model complex dynamical change.
Mindfulness
October 2, 2025
Shani Zohar Puris, Kim Yuval, Gebreyohans Gebremariam et al.
A nonrandomized open trial tested the feasibility of Mindfulness-SOS, a lay- and minimally guided mobile health mindfulness- and compassion-based intervention adapted for diverse forcibly displaced people, among 60 Eritrean asylum-seekers in an unstable urban setting in Israel during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fifty-eight participants showed high adherence to session modules and moderate overall adherence. Higher pre-intervention post-traumatic stress symptoms and post-migration living difficulties predicted lower engagement with meditation practice exercises. Greater engagement with meditation exercises was associated with less deterioration in depression and anxiety, but not with change in post-traumatic stress symptoms, from pre- to post-intervention. Mindfulness-SOS may be a feasible selective preventive intervention for asylum-seekers in stressful post-displacement settings.
Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science
March 1, 2025
Noga Aviad, Oz Moskovich, Ophir Orenstein et al.
A machine learning algorithm classified electroencephalography (EEG) recordings from 26 experienced meditators as either a focused attention meditation state or a mind-wandering control state with 83% accuracy. The model identified 10 EEG features associated with increased power and coherence of high-frequency brain oscillations during meditation relative to mind-wandering. The findings help characterize the complex, systemic oscillatory activity underlying meditation states.