Despite decades of meditation research, there is a lack of preregistered and well-powered studies that investigate the effects of brief meditation practices on subjective wellbeing and use data-driven approaches to predict response to these interventions. Using representative samples of the US and UK adult populations with regards to age, sex, and ethnicity (N = 5049), we conducted a...
Mind‑body practices, such as meditation and yoga, involve paying attention to breathing sensations. During these practices, individuals report "interoceptive lapses," moments when attention drifts away from internal bodily sensations. While lapses in attention to the external world have been widely studied, little is known about the physiological and neural mechanisms of interoceptive lapses....
Importance: Depression most commonly first emerges during adolescence, making early prevention critical. While school-based mindfulness training (SBMT) offers a scalable prevention approach with broad reach, evidence of its effectiveness is mixed, and there is a compelling case for a more personalized approach to prevention. Objective: To develop a data-driven algorithm from baseline...
Mind body practices like meditation and yoga, which are widely used to support mental health, involve paying attention to internal bodily sensations like the breath. During these practices, individuals often report "interoceptive lapses," moments when attention drifts away from the body. While lapses in attention to the external world have been widely studied, far less is known about...
Objective measurement of mindfulness could help us understand the mechanisms of meditation interventions and how individuals vary in their disposition to be mindful. One proposed measure is the breath-counting task (BCT), which measures how accurately one can count cycles of their breath. Breath counting, which involves sustained attention, meta-awareness, and an internal locus of attention,...
This systematic narrative review examines neuroimaging studies that investigated the neural correlates of mindfulness-based interventions in youth (ages 0-18). We extracted 13 studies with a total of 467 participants aged 5-18 years from the MEDLINE database on February 21st, 2024. These studies included both typically developing youth and those at risk of developing or recovering from...
Although uncontrollability is the core feature of perseverative thought that best accounts for its relationship to psychopathology, other features - for example, valence and content - have also been identified as potentially clinically relevant in their own right. We describe results from a proof-of-concept study that examined the extent to which major underlying features of worry could be used...
INTRODUCTION: Meditation practice and psychedelic use have attracted increasing attention in the public sphere and scientific research. Both methods induce non-ordinary states of consciousness that may have significant therapeutic benefits. Thus, there is growing scientific interest in potential synergies between psychedelic use and meditation practice with some research suggesting that...
Breathing meditation typically consists of directing attention toward breathing and redirecting attention when the mind wanders. As yet, we do not have a full understanding of the neural mechanisms of breath attention, in particular, how large-scale network interactions may be different between breath attention and rest and how these interactions may be modulated during periods of on-task and...
Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is increasingly being incorporated into intervention studies to acquire a more fine-grained and ecologically valid assessment of change. The added utility of including relatively burdensome EMA measures in a clinical trial hinges on several psychometric assumptions, including that these measure are: (1) reliable, (2) related but not redundant with...
OBJECTIVE: they work. Mechanisms of change may be obscured due to prior research collapsing across heterogeneous subgroups of patients with differing underlying mechanisms of response. Studies identifying baseline individual characteristics that predict differential response (i.e., moderation) may inform research on why (i.e., mediation) a particular subgroup has better outcomes to an...
BACKGROUND: Meditation apps have surged in popularity in recent years, with an increasing number of individuals turning to these apps to cope with stress, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. Meditation apps are the most commonly used mental health apps for depression and anxiety. However, little is known about who is well suited to these apps. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to develop and test...
BACKGROUND Meditation apps have surged in popularity in recent years, with an increasing number of individuals turning to these apps to cope with stress, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, meditation apps now represent the most commonly used mental health apps for depression and anxiety. However, little is known regarding who is well-suited to these apps. OBJECTIVE The aim of this...
Meditation apps are popular and may reduce psychological distress, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it is not clear who is most likely to benefit. Using randomized controlled trial data comparing a 4-week meditation app (Healthy Minds Program; HMP) with an assessment-only control in school system employees (n=662), we developed an algorithm predicting who is most likely to...
Objective: Understanding the fluctuating emotional and cognitive states of adolescents with depressive symptoms requires fine-grained and naturalistic measurements. This study used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to investigate the affective correlates and consequences of mind-wandering in adolescents with anhedonia (AH) and typically developing (TD) controls. In addition, we examined the...