Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
May 1, 2025
Tania Singer
8 citations
Over the past two decades, the fields of social and contemplative neurosciences have made significant strides. Initial research utilizing fMRI identified neuronal networks involved in empathy, mentalizing, and compassion, as well as complex interactions among these networks. Subsequent studies shifted to testing the plasticity of these social skills via different types of mindfulness- or...
Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science
March 1, 2025
Lara M.c. Puhlmann, Pascal Vrtička, Roman Linz et al.
In this study, we investigated whether mindfulness- and meditation-based mental training that improves stress regulation can upregulate BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), an important promoter of hippocampal neuroplasticity, and examined cortisol reduction as a mediating pathway. In a randomized clinical trial, 332 healthy adults were randomly assigned to one of the 3 training cohorts or...
Journal of Clinical Medicine
June 3, 2024
Malvika Godara, Tania Singer
5 citations
Background: App-based contemplative interventions, such as mindfulness-based interventions, have gained popularity for the promotion of mental health; however, the understanding of underlying intervention-specific mechanisms remains limited, especially related to novel inter-relational dyadic practices. Methods: We tested (n = 253) seven putative mechanisms underlying two brief (daily 12-min)...
Journal of Affective Disorders
June 1, 2024
Malvika Godara, Martin Hecht, Tania Singer
11 citations
Effects of online contemplative practices, especially partner-based practices, on psychological well-being remain mixed, with sparse understanding of potential affective-cognitive mechanisms. The study aimed to assess the efficacy of two online contemplative interventions in improving depression, anxiety, emotion regulation (ER), and resilience, and to evaluate the mechanistic role of negative...
Journal of Personalized Medicine
May 4, 2024
Malvika Godara, Tania Singer
6 citations
Low-dose app-based contemplative interventions for mental health are increasingly popular, but heterogeneity in intervention responses indicates that a personalized approach is needed. We examined whether different longitudinal resilience-vulnerability trajectories, derived over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, predicted differences in diverse mental health outcomes after mindfulness and...
Scientific Reports
August 24, 2023
Paul Petzold, Sarita Silveira, Malvika Godara et al.
Contemplative practice has demonstrated benefits for mental health and well-being. Most previous studies, however, implemented in-person trainings containing a mix of different, mostly solitary, practices and focused on pre- to post-training outcomes. In this randomized trial, we explore the immediate differential efficacy of two daily app-delivered practices in shifting emotional (valence,...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
December 22, 2022
Christopher Timmermann, Prisca R. Bauer, Olivia Gosseries et al.
145 citations
No contemporary unifying framework has been provided for the study of non-ordinary states of consciousness (NSCs) despite increased interest in hypnosis, meditation, and psychedelics. NSCs induce shifts in experiential contents (what appears to the experiencer) and/or structure (how it appears). This can allow the investigation of the plastic and dynamic nature of experience from a multiscale...
Psychoneuroendocrinology
July 1, 2022
Katja Hoehne, Pascal Vrtička, Veronika Engert et al.
Based on its role in social processing and stress, oxytocin has been suggested to mediate stress reduction of socio-affective, compassion-based mental training. We tested this hypothesis in the ReSource Project, a 9-month longitudinal mental training study. Participants practiced three different types of mental training, targeting either attentional abilities (Presence Module), socio-affective...
Neuroimage
August 15, 2021
Pauline Favre, Philipp Kanske, Haakon Engen et al.
Meditation-based mental training interventions show physical and mental health benefits. However, it remains unclear how different types of mental practice affect emotion processing at both the neuronal and the behavioural level. In the context of the ReSource project, 332 participants underwent an fMRI scan while performing an emotion anticipation task before and after three 3-month training...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
November 13, 2020
Lara M.c. Puhlmann, Pascal Vrtička, Roman Linz et al.
preprint
Objective This study had the objective to investigate the effect of regular contemplative mental training on endocrine indices of long-term stress.
Current Opinion in Psychology
August 1, 2019
Tania Singer, Veronika Engert
Mindfulness interventions have gained much attraction, also due to their promise to improve health and wellbeing. However, not enough attention is devoted to the differentiation between various mental practice types. Here, we summarize findings from the ReSource Project, a 9-month longitudinal mental training study comparing practices focusing on (a) present-moment attention and interoception,...
Consciousness and Cognition
July 1, 2018
Marisa Przyrembel, Tania Singer
Despite increasing interest in effects of meditation, systematic in-depth research on how it qualitatively feels to engage in different kinds of contemplative practices is still missing. To fill this gap, we explore the validity of Micro-phenomenological Interviews (MpI) to assess experiences during breathing meditation (BM), observing-thought meditation (OTM), and loving-kindness meditation...
Brain and Behavior
April 1, 2018
Anna-Lena Lumma, Sofie L. Valk, Anne Böckler et al.
Self-referential processing is a key component of the emotional self-concept. Previous studies have shown that emotional self-referential processing is related to structure and function of cortical midline areas such as medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and that it can be altered on a behavioral level by specific mental training practices. However, it remains unknown how behavioral...
Mindfulness
December 1, 2017
Lea K. Hildebrandt, Cade McCall, Tania Singer
Research on the effects of mindfulness- and compassion-based interventions is flourishing along with self-report scales to assess facets of these broad concepts. However, debates remain as to which mental practices are most appropriate to develop the attentional, cognitive, and socio-affective facets of mindfulness and compassion. One crucial question is whether present-moment,...
Neuropsychologia
August 31, 2017
Haakon Engen, B. Bernhardt, Leon Skottnik et al.
ABSTRACT Our goal was to assess the effects of long‐term mental training in socio‐affective skills on structural brain networks. We studied a group of long‐term meditation practitioners (LTMs) who have focused on cultivating socio‐affective skills using loving‐kindness and compassion meditation for an average of 40k h, comparing these to meditation‐naïve controls. To maximize homogeneity of...
Psychophysiology
March 1, 2017
Boris Bornemann, Tania Singer
The ability to accurately perceive signals from the body has been shown to be important for physical and psychological health as well as understanding one's emotions. Despite the importance of this skill, often indexed by heartbeat perception accuracy (HBPa), little is known about its malleability. Here, we investigated whether contemplative mental practice can increase HBPa. In the context of...
JAMA Psychiatry
February 1, 2017
Bethany E Kok, Tania Singer
Loneliness is a risk factor for depression and other illnesses and may be caused and reinforced by maladaptive social cognition. Secularized classical meditation training programs address social cognition, but practice typically occurs alone. Little is known about the effectiveness of contemplative practice performed in dyads. To introduce and assess the effectiveness of contemplative dyadic...
Mindfulness
August 18, 2016
Bethany E Kok, Tania Singer
154 citations
Despite increasing interest in the effects of mental training practices such as meditation, there is much ambiguity regarding whether and to what extent the various types of mental practice have differential effects on psychological change. To address this gap, we compare the effects of four common meditation practices on measures of state change in affect, mind-wandering, meta-cognition, and...
International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology
July 1, 2015
Anna-Lena Lumma, Bethany E Kok, Tania Singer
Meditation is often associated with a relaxed state of the body. However, meditation can also be regarded as a type of mental task and training, associated with mental effort and physiological arousal. The cardiovascular effects of meditation may vary depending on the type of meditation, degree of mental effort, and amount of training. In the current study we assessed heart rate (HR),...
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
February 19, 2015
Haakon Engen, Tania Singer
170 citations
Emotion regulation research has primarily focused on techniques that attenuate or modulate the impact of emotional stimuli. Recent evidence suggests that this mode regulation can be problematic in the context of regulation of emotion elicited by the suffering of others, resulting in reduced emotional connectedness. Here, we investigated the effects of an alternative emotion regulation technique...
Frontiers in Psychology
January 6, 2015
Boris Bornemann, B. Herbert, W. Mehling et al.
Interoceptive body awareness (IA) is crucial for psychological well-being and plays an important role in many contemplative traditions. However, until recently, standardized self-report measures of IA were scarce, not comprehensive, and the effects of interoceptive training on such measures were largely unknown. The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) questionnaire...