Open Mind
2025
Veena Kumari, Satyam Chauhan, Emmanuelle Peters
preprint
There is increased recognition of a need to better understand and explain non-ordinary experiences and spirituality at different levels and consider their potential implications and applications for improving mental health. An important question in this context is: Do individuals who report psychotic-like experiences (e.g., hear voices), but do not find them distressing and do not have a...
Consciousness and Cognition
July 8, 2024
Veena Kumari, Umisha Tailor, A. Saifullah et al.
5 citations
Startle modulation paradigms, namely habituation and prepulse inhibition (PPI), can offer insight into the brain's early information processing mechanisms that might be impacted by regular meditation practice. Habituation refers to decreasing response to a repeatedly-presented startle stimulus, reflecting its redundancy. PPI refers to response reduction when a startling stimulus "pulse" is...
Nature and Science of Sleep
March 1, 2024
Qi Rui See, Kausar Raheel, Iain Duncan et al.
8 citations
Background: Speech graph analysis (SGA) of dreams has recently shown promise as an objective and language-invariant diagnostic tool that can aid neuropsychiatric diagnosis. Whilst the notion that dreaming mentations reflect distinct physiologic processes is not new, such studies in patients with sleep disorders remain exceptionally scarce. Here, using SGA and other dream content analyses, we...
International Journal of Psychophysiology
February 2023
Veena Kumari, Elena Antonova, S Mahmood et al.
There is growing evidence of beneficial effects of mindfulness developed through engaging in mindfulness training/practices on sensory and cognitive processing, emotion regulation and mental health. Mindfulness has also been conceptualised as a dispositional 'trait', i.e. the naturally-occurring ability of meditation-naïve individuals to display, in varying degree, a non-judgmental non-reactive...
Frontiers in Psychiatry
2021
Elena Antonova, Karoly Schlosser, Rakesh Pandey et al.
The novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 that first emerged in Wuhan, China, in Nov-Dec 2019 has already impacted a significant proportion of the world population. Governments of many countries imposed quarantines and social distancing measures in 2020, many of which remain in place, to mitigate the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 virus causing the COVID-19 disease. The direct impact of COVID-19 on...
Consciousness and Cognition
February 2017
Veena Kumari, Elena Antonova, Bernice Wright et al.
This study examined the effects of cultivated (i.e. developed through training) and dispositional (trait) mindfulness on smooth pursuit (SPEM) and antisaccade (AS) tasks known to engage the fronto-parietal network implicated in attentional and motion detection processes, and the fronto-striatal network implicated in cognitive control, respectively. Sixty healthy men (19-59years), of whom 30...
Schizophrenia Research: Cognition
September 2016
Elena Antonova, Kavitha Amaratunga, Bernice Wright et al.
Despite growing evidence for demonstrated efficacy of mindfulness in various disorders, there is a continuous concern about the relationship between mindfulness practice and psychosis. As schizotypy is part of the psychosis spectrum, we examined the relationship between long-term mindfulness practice and schizotypy in two independent studies. Study 1 included 24 experienced mindfulness...
PLoS One
May 6, 2015
Elena Antonova, Paul Chadwick, Veena Kumari
41 citations
BACKGROUND: Mindfulness as a mode of sustained and receptive attention promotes openness to each incoming stimulus, even if repetitive and/or aversive. Mindful attention has been shown to attenuate sensory habituation in expert meditators; however, others were not able to replicate this effect. The present study used acoustic startle reflex to investigate the effect of mindfulness practice...