Frontiers in Public Health
2026
My Ngoc To, Ramona Beltrán, Keli King
Contemplative practices encompass a range of mental and physical exercises that cultivate awareness, steadiness, and compassion. While contemplative practices have been shown to treat trauma, their application toward historical trauma is limited. To address this gap, our scoping review aims to answer the following research questions: (1) What contemplative practices have been applied toward...
Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine
April 1, 2025
My Ngoc To, Nicole Nicotera, Kaipeng Wang
1 citation
Background: Mind-body practices (MBPs), which include seated- (meditation) and movement-based practices (yoga, Tai Chi, qigong), have grown increasingly popular in the United States for improving mental and physical wellness. While literature has identified socioeconomic and health-related factors related to seated- and movement-MBP engagement separately, no studies have explored the factors...
Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging
March 1, 2025
Michael Datko, Jacqueline Lutz, Richa Gawande et al.
1 citation
Behavior change often requires overcoming discomfort or difficult emotions. Emotional dysregulation associated with anxiety or depression may prevent behavior change initiation among people managing chronic illness. Mindfulness training may catalyze chronic disease self-management by reducing experiential avoidance of aversive experiences that act as barriers to change initiation. Using a fMRI...
Psychiatry Research
December 1, 2024
Zev Schuman-Olivier, Richa Gawande, Timothy B. Creedon et al.
10 citations
Mindfulness catalyzes health behavior change. Yet, interoception is dysregulated in depression, potentially impairing behavioral activation. We examined the mediating role of interoceptive appreciation, as measured by how much one trusts and listens to internal bodily signals, on behavior change. Primary care patients with depression, anxiety, or stress disorders related to chronic illness were...
Psychiatry Research Case Reports
March 8, 2024
My Ngoc To, Zev Schuman-Olivier
2 citations
Approximately 15-30 % of individuals diagnosed with PTSD experience high levels of dissociation, a condition categorized in the DSM-V as a dissociative subtype of PTSD (PTSD-D). Despite the rising number of studies supporting mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) for the treatment of PTSD, literature on mindfulness and dissociation remains scarce and discording. While best practices for...
Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging
December 1, 2022
Michael Datko, Jacqueline Lutz, Richa Gawande et al.
Interoceptive dysfunction is often present in anxiety and depression. We investigated the effects of an 8-week intervention, Mindfulness Training for Primary Care (MTPC), on brain mechanisms of interoceptive attention among patients with anxiety and/or depression. We hypothesized that fMRI brain response to interoception in the insula, a region known for interoceptive processing, would increase...