Abstract Emerging evidence suggests that adults with a history of early life adversity (ELA), while more susceptible to psychopathology, may also be particularly sensitive to the benefits of contemplative practices. In the present study, we examined whether ELA was associated with greater mental health benefits following a contemplative-based social resilience training program, administered as...
Burnout is common among genetic counselors (GCs). Clinician burnout has been found to adversely affect individual well-being, patient care, and likelihood of staying in a role. Both individual and systems solutions are needed to address clinician burnout. Mindfulness meditation (MM) is one individual-level solution that has shown promise for reducing burnout in other clinicians but has not been...
Compassion is a valuable, trainable skill which can bring significant benefits to oneself and others. One method for developing compassion towards others is Tonglen, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation which involves taking in suffering from others and sending them well-being. The aim of this study was to investigate the psychophysiological outcomes of Tonglen meditation in healthcare workers, a...
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...
Background The use of mindfulness in the treatment of anxiety and depression is becoming more and more widespread, but there are few reports that it has fundamentally changed patients’ sense of life. Case Presentation This report showed 9 year’s progress of treatment for Social Anxiety Disorder and Persistent Depressive Disorder in a 41-year-old female patient experiencing a long-term painful...
To evaluate the neurophenomenology of automatic writing (AW) in a spontaneous automatic writer (NN) and four high hypnotizables (HH). During fMRI, NN and the HH were cued to perform spontaneous (NN) or induced (HH) AW, and a comparison task of copying complex symbols, and to rate their experience of control and agency. Compared to copying, for all participants AW was associated with less sense...
This is an editorial piece for a special issue (SI) in Frontiers of Psychology on 'The Varieties of Contemplative Experiences and Practices'. While diverse contemplative techniques are employed across a plethora of traditions around the world, contemplative research over the years has not reflected this variety. Despite exponential growth in contemplative research in recent decades, it has...
Abstract Objectives This nonrandomized trial investigated the feasibility and mental health outcomes associated with a mindfulness family caregiver (MFC) training program delivered online. Method The study included 216 family caregivers (85.2% female; mean age = 57.34, SD = 12.87; 83.4% White, 2.8% Black, 12% Asian, 8.1% Hispanic, 1.8% American Indian/Alaska Native) who enrolled in the weekly,...
Objectives: To investigate outcomes and predictors of a Tibetan Buddhist meditation process called Feeding Your Demons® (FYD) vs. a waitlist (WL) control group of meditation practitioners with moderate depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms. Methods: 61 meditators (70% female; mean age = 44.05, SD = 11.20; 43.5% White, 39% Asian, 9.3% Hispanic, 8.3% other) were randomly assigned to 1-month of...
Alterations of the sense of self induced by meditation include an increased sense of boundarylessness. In this study, we investigated behavioural and functional magnetic resonance imaging correlates of trait self-boundarylessness during resting state and the performance of two experimental tasks. We found that boundarylessness correlated with greater self-endorsement of words related to...
Contemplative science has made great strides in the empirical investigation of meditation practices, such as how mindfulness, compassion, and mantra practices impact health and well-being. However, meditation practices from the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition that use mental imagery to transform distressing beliefs and emotions have been little explored. We examined the “Feeding Your Demons”...
Cognitive behavioral group therapy (CBGT) and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) are thought to help patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) via distinct emotion-regulation mechanisms. However, no study has compared the effects of CBGT and MBSR on brain and negative emotion indicators of cognitive reappraisal and acceptance in patients with SAD. To investigate the effects of CBGT and...
Contemporary scholarship on mindfulness casts it as a form of purely non-evaluative engagement with experience. Yet, traditionally mindfulness was not intended to operate in a vacuum of dispassionate observation, but was seen as facilitative of eudaimonic mental states. In spite of this historical context, modern psychological research has neglected to ask the question of how the practice of...
Contemplative practices are thought to modify one's experience of self and fundamentally change self-referential processing. However, few studies have examined the brain correlates of self-referential processing in long-term meditators. Here, we used the self-referential encoding task (SRET) to examine event-related potentials (ERP) during assessment of pleasant and unpleasant self-views in...
We examined (1) differences between controls and patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) in emotional clarity and attention to emotions; (2) changes in emotional clarity and attention to emotions associated with cognitive-behavioral group therapy (CBGT), mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), or a waitlist (WL) condition; and (3) whether emotional clarity and attention to emotions...
Objective: Meditation is one type of mental training that has been shown to produce many cognitive benefits. Meditation practice is associated with improvement in concentration and reduction of stress, depression and anxiety symptoms. Furthermore, different forms of meditation training are now being used as interventions for a variety of psychological and somatic illnesses. These benefits are...
The goal of this study was to investigate treatment outcome and mediators of cognitive-behavioral group therapy (CBGT) versus mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) versus waitlist (WL) in patients with generalized social anxiety disorder (SAD). One hundred eight unmedicated patients (55.6% female; mean age = 32.7 years, SD = 8.0; 43.5% Caucasian, 39% Asian, 9.3% Hispanic, 8.3% other) were...
Over the past several decades, a corpus of research has emerged detailing the therapeutic outcomes and processes of mindfulness. The emergence of the field of contemplative science has given rise t...
Mind wandering, or the tendency for attention to drift to task-irrelevant thoughts, has been associated with worse intra- and inter-personal functioning. Utilizing daily experience sampling with 51 adults during 9-weeks of a compassion meditation program, we examined effects on mind wandering (to neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant topics) and caring behaviors for oneself and others. Results...
Previous research has demonstrated that mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) improves psychological functioning in multiple domains. However, to date, no studies have examined the effects of MBSR on moral reasoning and decision making. This single group design study examined the effect of MBSR on moral reasoning and ethical decision making, mindfulness, emotion, and well-being....
Objective: Effective treatments for social anxiety disorder (SAD) exist, but additional treatment options are needed for nonresponders as well as those who are either unable or unwilling to engage in traditional treatments. Mindfulness‐based stress reduction (MBSR) is one nontraditional treatment that has demonstrated efficacy in treating other mood and anxiety disorders, and preliminary data...
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is thought to reduce emotional reactivity and enhance emotion regulation in patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD). The goal of this study was to examine the neural correlates of deploying attention to regulate responses to negative self-beliefs using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants were 56 patients with generalized SAD in a...
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by distorted self-views. The goal of this study was to examine whether mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) alters behavioral and brain measures of negative and positive self-views. Fifty-six adult patients with generalized SAD were randomly assigned to MBSR or a comparison aerobic exercise (AE) program. A self-referential encoding task was...
Ambiguous sensory stimuli provide insight into the dynamics of the human mind. When viewing substantially different images in the two eyes (i.e., binocular rivalry), perception spontaneously fluctuates between the two images along with patch-like mixtures of the two, with limited ability to control such fluctuations. Previous studies have shown that long-term meditation training can enable a...
Abstract Background:The use of mindfulness in the treatment of anxiety and depression is becoming more and more widespread, but there are few reports that it has fundamentally changed patients' sense of life. Case Presentation:This report showed 9 year’s progress of treatment for Social Anxiety Disorder and Persistent Depressive Disorder in a 41year-old female patient experiencing a long-term...