A culturally adapted mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program for Chinese adults with chronic pain led to greater short-term reductions in pain catastrophizing compared with treatment as usual, though the effect was not maintained at three months. Among participants who completed the program, MBSR also reduced pain interference and perceived stress. Brain scans showed that both groups had decreased regional homogeneity in the frontal lobe, while increased activity in the cerebellum anterior lobe was unique to the MBSR group. The findings suggest modest benefits of a culturally adapted MBSR program for certain pain-related outcomes in Chinese adults with chronic pain.
Both awareness and acceptance are linked to lower psychological stress in adolescents, but awareness alone may be more beneficial than combining it with acceptance. A survey of 3,304 adolescents found that both traits were negatively associated with stress, with awareness showing a stronger relationship. A randomized trial with 304 adolescents assigned to an awareness group, an awareness-plus-acceptance group, or control groups found that the awareness group reduced stress more than the combined group (effect size d = -0.23) and the blank control (d = -0.56). A third observational study of 111 adolescents indicated that conflict monitoring—a component of attention control—partly explains how awareness reduces stress.
A single 10-minute session of brief focused mindfulness meditation (BFMM) in 24 young adults was associated with significant decreases in heart rate and respiratory rate, and with changes in theta and beta brainwave power in right frontotemporal and frontocentral regions. An ensemble deep learning model combining multi-layer perceptron, long short-term memory, and convolutional neural network classified EEG signals from meditation versus resting states with 79.0% accuracy, outperforming individual models. The findings suggest that even a brief meditation session can regulate autonomic nervous system activity and modulate neural activity, and that the ensemble model may support future EEG-based assessment of mindfulness.