Objective: Childhood trauma is thought to program biological adaptations to stress that confer lifelong health risk. Mindfulness interventions have improved mental health among adults exposed to childhood trauma, but whether they can offset physical health risk is unknown. This trial evaluated effects of mindfulness and coping interventions on daily life stress processes in this population....
Introduction Childhood abuse has a significant impact on adulthood mental health. Many children cope with the threat of abuse through avoidant strategies; however, this adaptation may contribute to the development of depersonalization symptoms and dissociative disorders. In contrast, the development of trait mindfulness, the tendency to monitor present-moment experience from an accepting...
Loneliness is one of the most robust risk factors for morbidity and accelerated mortality among older adults, and effective interventions are needed. However, interventions to reduce loneliness have shown limited success, especially in this population. Indeed, research suggests that simply increasing social contact might not combat loneliness; instead, addressing the cognitive and emotional...
= .21). Results suggest that mindfulness training, and acceptance training in particular, can broaden awareness to include more positive affective experiences. This work has important implications for understanding coping and affect dynamics following mindfulness interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
Loneliness is a potent psychosocial stressor that predicts poor health and mortality among older adults, possibly in part by accelerating age-related declines in immunocompetence. Mindfulness interventions have shown promise for reducing loneliness and improving markers of physical health. In a sample of lonely older adults, this two-arm parallel trial tested whether mindfulness training...
Early life stress (ELS), common to childhood maltreatment, socioeconomic disadvantage, and racial discrimination, is thought to create a proinflammatory phenotype that increases risk for poor health in adulthood. Systemic change is needed to address the root causes of ELS, but a substantial number of adults are already at increased health risk by virtue of ELS exposure. Interventions that...
Reactive aggression, a hostile retaliatory response to perceived threat, has been attributed to failures in emotion regulation. Interventions for reactive aggression have largely focused on cognitive control training, which target top-down emotion regulation mechanisms to inhibit aggressive impulses. Recent theory suggests that mindfulness training (MT) improves emotion regulation via both...
OBJECTIVE: Mindfulness interventions have been effective for improving a range of health outcomes; however, pathways underlying these effects remain unclear. Inflammatory processes may play a role, possibly through increased resistance of immune cells to the anti-inflammatory effects of glucocorticoids (i.e., glucocorticoid resistance, or GCR). Here, we conducted an initial examination of...
Mindfulness interventions have been shown to improve several subcomponents of attention; however, the psychological mechanisms driving these improvements are unknown. Mindfulness interventions train individuals to monitor present moment experiences while adopting an attitude of acceptance toward these experiences. We conducted a theoretically driven randomized controlled trial to test the...
Experiential acceptance—an orientation of receptivity and noninterference with present-moment experiences—is described as central to mindfulness interventions, yet little experimental work has tested acceptance as a mechanism for mindfulness intervention effects. Guided by Monitor and Acceptance Theory (MAT), this review situates acceptance as an emotion regulation mechanism and reviews...
Mindfulness interventions have garnered significant attention as a complementary health treatment for many physical and psychological conditions. While some research has shown that mindfulness training can decrease psychological and physiological stress responses, it remains unclear whether mindfulness training impacts inflammation-a predictor of poor health outcomes. In addition, little...
OBJECTIVE: Mindfulness interventions have been shown to reduce stress; however, the mechanisms driving stress resilience effects are not known. Mindfulness interventions aim to teach individuals how to: (a) use attention to monitor present moment experiences; with (b) an attitude of acceptance and equanimity. A randomized controlled dismantling trial (RCT) was conducted to test the prediction...
Objective There has been substantial research and public interest in mindfulness interventions, biological pathways, and health for the past two decades. This article reviews recent developments in understanding relationships between mindfulness interventions and physical health. Methods A selective review was conducted with the goal of synthesizing conceptual and empirical relationships...
Significance Loneliness (i.e., feeling alone) and social isolation (i.e., being alone) are among the most robust known risk factors for poor health and accelerated mortality. Yet mitigating these social risk factors is challenging, as few interventions have been effective for both reducing loneliness and increasing social contact. Mindfulness interventions, which train skills in monitoring...
Mindfulness meditation interventions-which train skills in monitoring present-moment experiences with a lens of acceptance-have shown promise for increasing positive emotions. Using a theory-based approach, we hypothesized that learning acceptance skills in mindfulness interventions helps people notice more positive experiences in daily life, and tested whether removing acceptance training from...
Mindfulness meditation interventions – which train skills in monitoring present-moment experiences with a lens of acceptance – have shown promise for increasing positive emotions. Using a theory-based approach, we hypothesized that learning acceptance skills in mindfulness interventions helps people notice more positive experiences in daily life, and tested whether removing acceptance training...
OBJECTIVE: Over the last 10 years, there has been a dramatic increase in published randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of brief mindfulness training (from single-session inductions to multisession interventions lasting up to 2 weeks), with some preliminary indications that these training programs may improve mental health outcomes, such as negative affectivity. This meta-analysis aimed to...
Objective: Mindfulness interventions, which train practitioners to monitor their present-moment experience with a lens of acceptance, are known to buffer stress reactivity. Little is known about the active mechanisms driving these effects. We theorize that acceptance is a critical emotion regulation mechanism underlying mindfulness stress reduction effects. Method: In this three-arm parallel...
OBJECTIVE: Mindfulness meditation training has been previously shown to enhance behavioral measures of executive control (e.g., attention, working memory, cognitive control), but the neural mechanisms underlying these improvements are largely unknown. Here, we test whether mindfulness training interventions foster executive control by strengthening functional connections between dorsolateral...
Mindfulness meditation programs, which train individuals to monitor their present-moment experience in an open or accepting way, have been shown to reduce mind wandering on standardized tasks in several studies. Here we test 2 competing accounts for how mindfulness training reduces mind wandering, evaluating whether the attention-monitoring component of mindfulness training alone reduces mind...
Despite evidence linking trait mindfulness and mindfulness training with a broad range of effects, still little is known about its underlying active mechanisms. Mindfulness is commonly defined as (1) the ongoing monitoring of present-moment experience (2) with an orientation of acceptance. Building on conceptual, clinical, and empirical work, we describe a testable theoretical account to help...
Mindfulness meditation training interventions have been shown to improve markers of health, but the underlying neurobiological mechanisms are not known. Building on initial cross-sectional research showing that mindfulness meditation may increase default mode network (DMN) resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) with regions important in top-down executive control (dorsolateral prefrontal...
Recent studies indicate that mindfulness meditation training interventions reduce stress and improve stress-related health outcomes, but the neural pathways for these effects are unknown. The present research evaluates whether mindfulness meditation training alters resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) of the amygdala, a region known to coordinate stress processing and physiological...
Initial well-controlled studies have suggested that mindfulness training interventions can improve a broad range of mental and physical health outcomes (e.g., HIV pathogenesis, depression relapse, inflammation, drug abuse), yet the underlying pathways linking mindfulness and health are poorly understood. In this article, we offer a mindfulness stress buffering account to explain these health...