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.
Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging
April 1, 2025
Yanli Lin, Daniel A Atad, Anthony P Zanesco
4 citations
EEG remains a powerful and non-obsolete tool for studying the neural basis of mindfulness. The review outlines EEG's unique advantages for experimental design, highlights new analytic approaches and translational paradigms, and gives examples from the authors' work and the broader literature. It argues that EEG can still spark new insights in both basic science and clinical applications of mindfulness, and encourages investigators to fully use its capabilities to advance contemplative neuroscience.
Network Neuroscience
March 13, 2026
Yanli Lin, Marne L. White, Jihong Zhang et al.
1 citation
Alpha and theta brain rhythms have been linked to mindfulness, but connecting brain activity to subjective experience is difficult. This study used network analysis on data from 16 novices who completed up to 24 sessions of focused attention and open monitoring meditation, with EEG and self-reported mindfulness collected. Distinct network structures emerged for each practice, supporting their theoretical differences. Shared features included strong autoregressive effects for mindfulness—consistent with skill learning—and opposing influences of frontal versus posterior alpha power. The results challenge simple interpretations of meditation-related EEG, suggesting the functional meaning of neural activity depends on the specific practice and training stage.
Mindfulness
May 11, 2026
Marne L. White, Yanli Lin, Todd S. Braver
Focused attention (FA) and open monitoring (OM) meditation practices produce distinct psychological effects, and their neural correlates differ. In a within-subject experiment with EEG recording, participants engaged in FA, OM, and an active control condition. Both FA and OM increased self-reported state mindfulness and decreased theta power compared to control; OM also reduced alpha power relative to FA. Crucially, higher theta power was associated with greater state mindfulness in both FA and OM, but more strongly in OM, while reduced alpha power was linked to higher mindfulness only during OM. These results indicate that theta and alpha brain rhythms have context-dependent roles in shaping subjective meditation experiences.
October 2, 2025
Yanli Lin, Grant S Shields
preprint
Focused attention (FA) meditation narrows attentional scope, reducing initial distraction but limiting rapid recalibration beyond the initial focus. Open monitoring (OM) meditation improves the speed of selecting relevant targets while slowing perceptual-motor encoding and motor execution. These distinct attentional mechanisms were identified by fitting a computational model to flanker task data from 29 meditation-naïve participants who completed brief FA, OM, and control inductions in a within-subject crossover protocol. The findings provide model-based evidence differentiating how FA and OM affect attention control processes.
June 27, 2024
Yanli Lin, Daniel Andrew Atad, Anthony P Zanesco
preprint
Electroencephalography (EEG) remains a valuable but often overlooked tool in contemplative neuroscience, despite being used for decades to study the neural mechanisms of mindfulness. This review argues that EEG offers unique advantages for addressing key research questions, particularly when combined with modern data acquisition and analytic techniques. The authors provide examples from their own work and the literature to show how EEG can advance both basic science and clinical applications of mindfulness. They aim to encourage researchers to fully utilize EEG's potential, emphasizing that older methods are not obsolete and can still drive new insights in the field.
Mindfulness
January 1, 2026
Yanli Lin, Grant S Shields
Focused attention (FA) meditation narrows the width of attentional focus and slows the rate at which attention can be narrowed further, while open monitoring (OM) meditation speeds up the rate of attention narrowing and increases nondecision time, suggesting distinct cognitive mechanisms. In a within-subject experiment with 29 meditation-naïve participants, FA reduced the maximum attentional spotlight width compared to OM and an active control condition, and slowed the rate of narrowing. OM accelerated attention narrowing and increased time for perceptual-motor and motor processes. These computational model-based results indicate FA may limit initial distraction but hinder rapid attentional recalibration, whereas OM improves target selection speed at the cost of slower encoding and execution.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
December 22, 2016
Yanli Lin, Megan Fisher, Sean Roberts et al.
Brief mindfulness meditation reduces emotional reactivity as measured by the late positive potential (LPP), an electrical brain response linked to emotional processing. In a study of participants, those who engaged in a guided meditation practice showed a smaller difference in LPP response between negative high-arousing and neutral stimuli over time, indicating reduced emotional reactivity. In contrast, simply instructing participants to attend mindfully to stimuli did not change the LPP. Dispositional mindfulness was also linked to reduced LPP responses to negative stimuli, but only among participants who listened to a control audio recording, not those who meditated. These findings suggest that practicing mindfulness meditation, rather than just adopting a mindful state, can cultivate emotional regulation similar to naturally high dispositional mindfulness.