bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
March 27, 2026
Morgan Rose Healey, Yaser Sanchez-Gama, Mengyuan Ding et al.
Abstract Self-transcendence, the reorientation of experience away from the self toward others, nature, or broader meaning, is a fundamental dimension of human psychology, yet its causal neural architecture remains poorly understood. Here we applied lesion network mapping to 88 neurosurgical patients with pre- and post-operative assessments of trait self-transcendence to identify the distributed...
BMC Medical Education
July 17, 2025
Denish Gunawan, Lia Antico, William Nardi et al.
2 citations
Medical students experience high rates of psychological distress, including depression, anxiety, burnout, and suicidality, due to rigorous academic demands. Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBI) have demonstrated small-to-moderate effectiveness in reducing stress and improving well-being, yet culturally adapted and developmentally appropriate programs for Indonesian medical students remain...
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. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging
April 1, 2025
Clemens C C Bauer, Daniel A Atad, Norman A. S. Farb et al.
3 citations
The observer effect (OE), the idea that observing a phenomenon changes it, has important implications across scientific disciplines involving measurement and observation. While often viewed as a confounding variable to control for, this paper argues that the OE should be seriously accounted for, explored, and systematically leveraged in research and clinical settings. Specifically, mindfulness...
JMIR Formative Research
January 24, 2025
Lia Antico, Judson A. Brewer
2 citations
Physician burnout is widespread in health care systems, with harmful consequences on physicians, patients, and health care organizations. Mindfulness training (MT) has proven effective in reducing burnout; however, its time-consuming requirements often pose challenges for physicians who are already struggling with their busy schedules. This study aimed to design a short and pragmatic digital MT...
Global advances in integrative medicine and health
2024
Frederick M Hecht, Rebecca S. Crane, Patricia J Moran et al.
2 citations
Prior data suggests the Mindfulness-Based Interventions: (MBI) Teaching Assessment Criteria (MBI:TAC) has good inter-rater reliability, but many raters knew teacher experience level. We sought to further evaluate the MBI-TAC's inter-rater reliability and obtain preliminary data on predictive validity. We videorecorded 21 MBSR teachers from academic and community settings. We trained 19...
Mindfulness
February 16, 2022
Morganne A. Kraines, Summer Peterson, G. Tremont et al.
Summarize existing literature on cognitive outcomes of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) for individuals with depression. Following PRISMA (2021) guidance, we conducted a systematic review. We searched databases for studies published from 2000 to 2020 which examined cognitive outcomes of MBSR and MBCT in individuals with at least mild...
Journal of Counseling Psychology
July 15, 2021
Shufang Sun, Danhua Lin, Simon B. Goldberg et al.
148 citations
This randomized controlled trial evaluated the effect of a mindfulness-based mobile health (mHealth) intervention, tailored to the pandemic context, among young adult students (N = 114) with elevated anxiety and/or depressive symptoms during quarantine in China, compared to a time- and attention-matched social support-based mHealth control. At baseline, postintervention (1 month), and 2-month...
Harvard Review of Psychiatry
November 1, 2020
Zev Schuman-Olivier, Marcelo Trombka, David Lovas et al.
Abstract Initiating and maintaining behavior change is key to the prevention and treatment of most preventable chronic medical and psychiatric illnesses. The cultivation of mindfulness, involving acceptance and nonjudgment of present-moment experience, often results in transformative health behavior change. Neural systems involved in motivation and learning have an important role to play. A...
Perspectives on Psychological Science
August 28, 2020
Vera U. Ludwig, Kirk Warren Brown, Judson A. Brewer
69 citations
To reach longer-term goals and live aligned with their values, people typically must regulate their behavior. Effortful self-control is one way to achieve this and is usually framed as a forceful struggle between lower-level impulses and higher-level cognitive control processes. For example, people may restrain themselves from eating cake in order to lose weight. An alternative avenue of...
Frontiers in Psychology
2018
Judson A. Brewer, Andrea Ruf, Ariel L Beccia et al.
83 citations
Emotional and other maladaptive eating behaviors develop in response to a diversity of triggers, from psychological stress to the endless external cues in our modern food environment. While the standard approach to food- and weight-related concerns has been weight-loss through dietary restriction, these interventions have produced little long-term benefit, and may be counterproductive. A...
Neuroimage
September 1, 2017
Remko Van Lutterveld, Edwin Van Dellen, Prasanta Pal et al.
85 citations
This study aims to identify novel quantitative EEG measures associated with mindfulness meditation. As there is some evidence that meditation is associated with higher integration of brain networks, we focused on EEG measures of network integration. Sixteen novice meditators and sixteen experienced meditators participated in the study. Novice meditators performed a basic meditation practice...
Psychological Medicine
December 29, 2016
Rebecca S. Crane, Judson A. Brewer, Christina Feldman et al.
861 citations
There has been an explosion of interest in mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. This is demonstrated in increased research, implementation of MBPs in healthcare, educational, criminal justice and workplace settings, and in mainstream interest. For the sustainable development of the field there is a need to...
Neuroimage
February 26, 2016
R. Lutterveld, Sean Dae Houlihan, Prasanta Pal et al.
Background: Meditation is increasingly showing beneficial effects for psychiatric disorders. However, learning to meditate is not straightforward as there are no easily discernible outward signs of performance and thus no direct feedback is possible. As meditation has been found to correlate with posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) activity, we tested whether source‐space EEG neurofeedback from...
Journal of Management
November 19, 2015
Darren Good, Christopher Lyddy, Theresa M. Glomb et al.
1,007 citations
Mindfulness research activity is surging within organizational science. Emerging evidence across multiple fields suggests that mindfulness is fundamentally connected to many aspects of workplace functioning, but this knowledge base has not been systematically integrated to date. This review coalesces the burgeoning body of mindfulness scholarship into a framework to guide mainstream management...
Medical problems of performing artists
June 1, 2015
Matthew Steinfeld, Judson A. Brewer
11 citations
While the music psychology and education literatures have devoted considerable attention to how musical instrumentalists practice their instruments, less formal scholarly attention has been given in consideration of what it means to maintain a musical "practice" over time and across context. In this paper, the practice of mindfulness meditation is used as heuristic, arguing for a view of...
Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience
April 22, 2015
Kathleen A. Garrison, Thomas Zeffiro, Dustin Scheinost et al.
309 citations
Meditation has been associated with relatively reduced activity in the default mode network, a brain network implicated in self-related thinking and mind wandering. However, previous imaging studies have typically compared meditation to rest, despite other studies having reported differences in brain activation patterns between meditators and controls at rest. Moreover, rest is associated with...
Brain and Behavior
February 12, 2014
Kathleen A. Garrison, Dustin Scheinost, R. Todd Constable et al.
80 citations
Loving kindness is a form of meditation involving directed well-wishing, typically supported by the silent repetition of phrases such as "may all beings be happy," to foster a feeling of selfless love. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the neural substrate of loving kindness meditation in experienced meditators and novices. We first assessed group differences in blood...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
2014
Judson A. Brewer, Kathleen A Garrison
There has been an increased interest in mindfulness and meditation training over the past decade. As evidenced by exponential growth in the number of publications since the beginning of the 21st century, progressively more is becoming known about both the clinical efficacy and underlying neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness training. This paper briefly highlights psychological models of...
Neuroimage
November 1, 2013
K. Garrison, Dustin Scheinost, Patrick D. Worhunsky et al.
Recent advances in brain imaging have improved the measure of neural processes related to perceptual, cognitive and affective functions, yet the relation between brain activity and subjective experience remains poorly characterized. In part, it is a challenge to obtain reliable accounts of participant's experience in such studies. Here we addressed this limitation by utilizing experienced...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2013
Judson A. Brewer, Kathleen A. Garrison, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli
264 citations
In the past decade, neuroimaging research has begun to identify key brain regions involved in self-referential processing, most consistently midline structures such as the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). The majority of studies have employed cognitive tasks such as judgment about trait adjectives or mind wandering, that have been associated with increased PCC activity. Conversely, tasks that...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2013
Kathleen A. Garrison, Juan F. Santoyo, Jake H. Davis et al.
226 citations
Neurophenomenological studies seek to utilize first-person self-report to elucidate cognitive processes related to physiological data. Grounded theory offers an approach to the qualitative analysis of self-report, whereby theoretical constructs are derived from empirical data. Here we used grounded theory methodology (GTM) to assess how the first-person experience of meditation relates to...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
November 23, 2011
Judson A. Brewer, Patrick D. Worhunsky, Jeremy R. Gray et al.
1,410 citations
Many philosophical and contemplative traditions teach that "living in the moment" increases happiness. However, the default mode of humans appears to be that of mind-wandering, which correlates with unhappiness, and with activation in a network of brain areas associated with self-referential processing. We investigated brain activity in experienced meditators and matched meditation-naive...
Addiction (Abingdon, England)
October 2010
Judson A Brewer, Sarah Bowen, Joseph T Smith et al.
Both depression and substance use disorders represent major global public health concerns and are often co-occurring. Although there are ongoing discoveries regarding the pathophysiology and treatment of each condition, common mechanisms and effective treatments for co-occurring depression and substance abuse remain elusive. Mindfulness training has been shown recently to benefit both...