Journal of Pain
August 1, 2026
Jon G. Dean, Ethan Hurwitz, T. Furnish et al.
Phantom limb pain (PLP) is a refractory condition defined by pain experienced in a missing limb. Psilocybin, a classical serotonergic psychedelic drug, can alleviate various treatment-resistant disorders but has scantly been investigated for chronic pain. This placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized clinical pilot trial (NCT05224336) tested the feasibility, tolerability, and preliminary...
Contemporary clinical trials communications
June 1, 2026
Anne Malaktaris, Niloofar Afari, Pollyanna Casmar et al.
Chronic pain with psychological comorbidity, especially posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and/or depression, is a prevalent and costly problem, especially among Veterans. Compassion meditation (CM) is a meditative practice that focuses on developing attentional regulation and the intention to assuage suffering. CM-based approaches show promise in ameliorating physical and mental health...
Pain
March 1, 2026
Anita B Amorim, Morgan Gianola, Daniel Barrows et al.
Mindfulness meditation, a slow breathing practice that is predicated on cultivating nonreactive awareness, also reduces pain. The existing literature has been mixed in demonstrating whether mindfulness meditation is more effective than slow breathing alone (ie, sham-mindfulness meditation) at reducing pain. Furthermore, smaller sample sizes in prior work have hindered a clear understanding of...
Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging
April 1, 2025
Saampras Ganesan, Fernando A Barrios, Ishaan Batta et al.
6 citations
Meditation is a family of ancient and contemporary contemplative mind-body practices that can modulate psychological processes, awareness, and mental states. Over the last 40 years, clinical science has manualized meditation practices and designed various meditation interventions that have shown therapeutic efficacy for disorders including depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety. Over the past...
Biological Psychiatry
2025
Gabriel Riegner, Jon G Dean, Tor D Wager et al.
Rather than a passive reflection of nociception, pain is shaped by the interplay between one's experiences, current cognitive-affective states, and expectations. The placebo response, a paradoxical yet reliable phenomenon, is postulated to reduce pain by engaging mechanisms shared with active therapies. It has been assumed that mindfulness meditation, practiced by sustaining nonjudgmental...
The journal of pain
July 1, 2024
Patrick H. Finan, Carly Hunt, Michael L. Keaser et al.
18 citations
Positive emotions are a promising target for intervention in chronic pain, but mixed findings across trials to date suggest that existing interventions may not be optimized to efficiently engage the target. The aim of the current pilot mechanistic randomized controlled trial was to test the effects of a positive emotion-enhancing intervention called Savoring Meditation on pain-related neural...
Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology
June 1, 2024
Lora Khatib, Jon G Dean, Valeria Oliva et al.
9 citations
Chronic low back pain (cLBP) is the most prevalent chronic pain condition. There are no treatments that haven been found to directly assuage evoked cLBP. To this extent, mindfulness-meditation is a promising pain therapy. Yet, it is unclear if meditation can be utilized to directly attenuate evoked chronic pain through endogenous opioids. A double-blind, randomized, and placebo-controlled...
Mindfulness
2023
Eric L Garland, R Lynae Roberts, Adam W. Hanley et al.
14 citations
Mindfulness is theorized to decrease the affective amplification of chronic pain by facilitating a shift from emotionally-laden, catastrophic pain appraisals of nociceptive input to reappraising chronic pain as an innocuous sensory signal that does not signify harm. Understanding of these hypothetical psychological mechanisms of mindfulness-based analgesia has been limited by a lack of direct...
Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland)
2023
Ramakrishnan Mani, Divya Bharatkumar Adhia, Sharon Awatere et al.
3 citations
Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic secondary musculoskeletal pain condition resulting in disability, reduced quality of life, and high societal costs. Pain associated with knee OA is linked to increased sensitivity in sensory, cognitive, and emotional areas of the brain. Self-regulation training targeting brain functioning related to pain experience could reduce pain and its associated...
Pain
July 7, 2022
Gabriel Riegner, Grace Posey, Valeria Oliva et al.
41 citations
ABSTRACT: For millenniums, mindfulness was believed to diminish pain by reducing the influence of self-appraisals of noxious sensations. Today, mindfulness meditation is a highly popular and effective pain therapy that is believed to engage multiple, nonplacebo-related mechanisms to attenuate pain. Recent evidence suggests that mindfulness meditation-induced pain relief is associated with the...
Social Psychological and Personality Science
November 18, 2021
Daniel R. Berry, Catherine S. J. Wall, Justin D. Tubbs et al.
29 citations
A randomized controlled trial tested whether mindfulness training would increase lab-based and in vivo spontaneous helping behaviors toward racial outgroup members. First, across conditions, those scoring higher in baseline trait mindfulness showed higher levels of preintervention lab-based and ecological momentary assessment (EMA)-based helping behavior. Next, short-term (4-day) training in...
Current Pain and Headache Reports
August 17, 2020
Alex Jinich-Diamant, Eric L Garland, Jennifer Baumgartner et al.
This review examines recent (2016 onwards) neuroscientific findings on the mechanisms supporting mindfulness-associated pain relief. To date, its clear that mindfulness lowers pain by engaging brain processes that are distinct from placebo and vary across meditative training level. Due to rapid developments in the field of contemplative neuroscience, an update review on the neuroimaging studies...
Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine
May 4, 2020
Joel Castellanos, C. Leonard Woolley, Kelly Bruno et al.
118 citations
The development of chronic pain is a complex mechanism that is still not fully understood. Multiple somatic and visceral afferent pain signals, when experienced over time, cause a strengthening of certain neural circuitry through peripheral and central sensitization, resulting in the physical and emotional perceptual chronic pain experience. The mind-altering qualities of psychedelics have been...
PLoS One
July 19, 2019
Jordan T. Quaglia, Fadel Zeidan, Peter G. Grossenbacher et al.
64 citations
In social contexts, the dynamic nature of others' emotions places unique demands on attention and emotion regulation. Mindfulness, characterized by heightened and receptive moment-to-moment attending, may be well-suited to meet these demands. In particular, mindfulness may support more effective cognitive control in social situations via efficient deployment of top-down attention. To test this,...
The journal of pain
June 1, 2019
Richard Harrison, Fadel Zeidan, George Kitsaras et al.
Mindfulness-based training reduces pain in clinical and experimental settings. Evidence suggests that these beneficial effects are facilitated via an increased focus on the present moment and a reduced emotional enhancement of pain. Most of the existing literature has focused on mindfulness as a learned skill and on the neural mechanisms that underlie the acquisition of this skill. It is...
Pain
December 1, 2018
Fadel Zeidan, Tim V Salomons, Suzan R Farris et al.
Interindividual differences in pain sensitivity vary as a function of interactions between sensory, cognitive-affective, and dispositional factors. Trait mindfulness, characterized as the innate capacity to nonreactively sustain attention to the present moment, is a psychological construct that is associated with lower clinical pain outcomes. Yet, the neural mechanisms supporting dispositional...
Current rheumatology reports
September 2017
Adrienne L Adler-Neal, Fadel Zeidan
Fibromyalgia is a disorder characterized by widespread pain and a spectrum of psychological comorbidities, rendering treatment difficult and often a financial burden. Fibromyalgia is a complicated chronic pain condition that requires a multimodal therapeutic approach to optimize treatment efficacy. Thus, it has been postulated that mind-body techniques may prove fruitful in treating...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
June 1, 2016
Fadel Zeidan, David R. Vago
304 citations
Pain is a multidimensional experience that involves interacting sensory, cognitive, and affective factors, rendering the treatment of chronic pain challenging and financially burdensome. Further, the widespread use of opioids to treat chronic pain has led to an opioid epidemic characterized by exponential growth in opioid misuse and addiction. The staggering statistics related to opioid use...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
June 1, 2016
David R. Vago, Fadel Zeidan
165 citations
Mind wandering and mindfulness are often described as divergent mental states with opposing effects on cognitive performance and mental health. Spontaneous mind wandering is typically associated with self-reflective states that contribute to negative processing of the past, worrying/fantasizing about the future, and disruption of primary task performance. On the other hand, mindful awareness is...
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
November 18, 2015
Fadel Zeidan, Nichole M Emerson, Suzan R Farris et al.
Mindfulness meditation reduces pain in experimental and clinical settings. However, it remains unknown whether mindfulness meditation engages pain-relieving mechanisms other than those associated with the placebo effect (e.g., conditioning, psychosocial context, beliefs). To determine whether the analgesic mechanisms of mindfulness meditation are different from placebo, we randomly assigned 75...
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
April 24, 2013
Fadel Zeidan, Katherine T. Martucci, Robert Kraft et al.
196 citations
Anxiety is the cognitive state related to the inability to control emotional responses to perceived threats. Anxiety is inversely related to brain activity associated with the cognitive regulation of emotions. Mindfulness meditation has been found to regulate anxiety. However, the brain mechanisms involved in meditation-related anxiety relief are largely unknown. We employed pulsed arterial...
PLoS One
May 15, 2012
A Chiesa, A Chiesa, A Chiesa et al.
217 citations
Two experiments examined the relation between mindfulness practice and cognitive rigidity by using a variation of the Einstellung water jar task. Participants were required to use three hypothetical jars to obtain a specific amount of water. Initial problems were solvable by the same complex formula, but in later problems (“critical” or “trap” problems) solving was possible by an additional...
Focus on Alternative and Complementary Therapies
May 12, 2011
Isabelle Marc, Fadel Zeidan, SK Johnson
Zeidan F, Johnson SK, Gordon NS, Goolkasian P. Effects of brief and sham mindfulness meditation on mood and cardiovascular variables. J Altern Complement Med 2010; 16: 867–73.
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
April 6, 2011
Fadel Zeidan, Katherine T Martucci, Robert A Kraft et al.
The subjective experience of one's environment is constructed by interactions among sensory, cognitive, and affective processes. For centuries, meditation has been thought to influence such processes by enabling a nonevaluative representation of sensory events. To better understand how meditation influences the sensory experience, we used arterial spin labeling functional magnetic resonance...
The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine
July 28, 2010
Fadel Zeidan, Susan K. Johnson, Nakia S. Gordon et al.
323 citations
OBJECTIVES: Although long-term meditation has been found to reduce negative mood and cardiovascular variables, the effects of a brief mindfulness meditation intervention when compared to a sham mindfulness meditation intervention are relatively unknown. This experiment examined whether a 3-day (1-hour total) mindfulness or sham mindfulness meditation intervention would improve mood and...