Mindfulness
December 1, 2024
Larissa G Duncan, Na Zhang, Trilce Santana et al.
6 citations
Integrating mindfulness skills training into group prenatal healthcare delivered in Spanish and English is feasible and may reduce postpartum depression. In a pragmatic pilot trial, 49 pregnant people (90% Black, Indigenous, and People of Color; 65% Latina/e/x; 63% Spanish-speaking) were allocated to standard CenteringPregnancy group care or CenteringPregnancy enhanced with mindfulness skills drawn from Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting. The enhanced group showed lower postpartum depression with a large effect size (Cohen's d = 0.80) and a trend toward lower postpartum anxiety (Cohen's d = 0.59). Effects on mindfulness, affect, and perceived stress were only partially supported. Satisfaction with care was high in both conditions.
BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth
May 10, 2025
Heidemarie K Laurent, Katherine L Haigler, Marissa D Sbrilli et al.
5 citations
Prenatal mindfulness training improves relational outcomes only for birthing-people with lower sociodemographic risk but elevated anxiety at baseline, and for those who practice mindfulness more during and after the class. In a randomized controlled trial comparing Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting (MBCP) with community birthing classes, a main effect favoring MBCP appeared only on parenting stress. Moderation analyses showed significant benefits of MBCP on individual outcomes (dispositional mindfulness, mental health, parenting stress) and relational outcomes (mindfulness in parenting, compassion, bonding with fetus/infant) for higher-risk anxious participants and for those with greater mindfulness practice dosage. The findings clarify that relational benefits depend on baseline risk characteristics and practice engagement, guiding targeted adaptation of mindfulness interventions for diverse families.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2020
Helen Y. Weng, Mushim P. Ikeda, Jarrod A Lewis-Peacock et al.
Mindfulness and compassion meditation are thought to promote prosocial behavior, but prior research has lacked diversity, limiting generalizability. To address this, researchers propose Intersectional Neuroscience, a framework that adapts research procedures to be inclusive of underrepresented groups through community engagement and individualized multivariate methods. Partnering with a diverse U.S. meditation center, they adapted fMRI screening and recruitment to include racial/ethnic minorities, gender and sexual minorities, people with disabilities, neuropsychiatric disorders, and lower-income individuals. They scanned 15 diverse meditators (80% racial/ethnic minorities, 53% gender and sexual minorities) and used individualized machine learning on fMRI data to decode mental states during breath-focused meditation. All participants' unique brain patterns were recognized significantly above chance. This demonstrates feasibility of inclusive neuroscience to develop individualized neural metrics of meditation.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2020
Helen Y. Weng, Jarrod A Lewis-Peacock, Frederick M Hecht et al.
Multi-voxel pattern analysis of fMRI data can recognize five internal attentional states—breath attention, mind wandering, self-referential processing, attention to feet, and attention to sounds—in individual participants with accuracy well above chance (over 41% vs. 20% chance). In a mixed sample of 16 experienced meditators and novices, classifiers trained on a directed attention task successfully identified these states in 87.5% of participants. When applied to a separate 10-minute meditation session, the classifiers indicated that participants spent more time attending to breath than mind wandering or self-referential processing. The findings suggest that objective, participant-level measurement of mental states during meditation is feasible, potentially improving assessment of internally-oriented attention cultivated by meditation.