Am J Orthopsychiatry
January 9, 2025
Ariana Thompson-Lastad, Shah Noor Hussein, Jessica M. Harrison et al.
= 47; 62% lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex or asexual; 23% Asian, 19% Black, 13% Hispanic/Latina/o, 32% White, 24% multiracial). Qualitative analysis identified three central themes: (1) the importance of a community of practice for creating a sense of belonging (including during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic); (2) the benefits of metta practice for cultivating...
Scientific Reports
September 24, 2023
Tammi R. A. Kral, Helen Y. Weng, Vikramjit Mitra et al.
25 citations
Mind-body interventions such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) may improve well-being by increasing awareness and regulation of physiological and cognitive states. However, it is unclear how practice may alter long-term, baseline physiological processes, and whether these changes reflect improved well-being. Using respiration rate (RR), which can be sensitive to effects of...
Frontiers in Psychology
September 8, 2021
Cynthia J. Price, Helen Y. Weng
Emotions are by nature embodied, as the brain has evolved to quickly assess the emotional significance of stimuli and output signals to the body’s viscera and periphery to aid adaptive responses. Emotions involve both implicit bodily and explicit narrative processes, and patients may experience transdiagnostic distress when bodily signals are not attended to and holistically integrated with...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2020
Helen Y. Weng, Jarrod A Lewis-Peacock, Frederick M Hecht et al.
9 citations
Meditation practices are often used to cultivate interoception or internally-oriented attention to bodily sensations, which may improve health via cognitive and emotional regulation of bodily signals. However, it remains unclear how meditation impacts internal attention (IA) states due to lack of measurement tools that can objectively assess mental states during meditation practice itself, and...
Frontiers in Psychology
2020
Helen Y. Weng, Mushim P. Ikeda, Jarrod A Lewis-Peacock et al.
Mindfulness and compassion meditation are thought to cultivate prosocial behavior. However, the lack of diverse representation within both scientific and participant populations in contemplative neuroscience may limit generalizability and translation of prior findings. To address these issues, we propose a research framework called Intersectional Neuroscience which adapts research procedures to...
PLoS One
August 28, 2019
Simon B. Goldberg, Matthew J. Hirshberg, Lawrence Y. Tello et al.
2 citations
The impact of meditation training on self-report psychological variables is well-established. Although meditation training is purported to have interpersonal impacts, whether naïve observers perceive differences associated with long- and short-term meditation training is largely unknown. The current study provided a stringent test of this possibility through observer ratings of a very thin...
Frontiers in Psychology
2018
Helen Y. Weng, Regina C Lapate, Diane E Stodola et al.
Compassion meditation training is hypothesized to increase the motivational salience of cues of suffering, while also enhancing equanimous attention and decreasing emotional reactivity to suffering. However, it is currently unknown how compassion meditation impacts visual attention to suffering, and how this impacts neural activation in regions associated with motivational salience as well as...
Oxford Handbooks Online
October 5, 2017
Helen Y. Weng, Brianna S. Schuyler, Richard J. Davidson
Compassion meditation is a form of mental training that cultivates compassion towards oneself and other people, and is thought to result in greater prosocial behavior in real-world settings. This framework views compassion as a quality that can be trained, rather than a stable trait, and scientists have started testing these hypotheses using neuroscientific and objective behavioral methods. How...
Helen Y. Weng, Mushim P. Ikeda, Jarrod A Lewis-Peacock et al.
Mindfulness and compassion meditation are thought to cultivate prosocial behavior. However, the lack of diverse representation within both scientific and participant populations in contemplative neuroscience may limit generalizability and translation of prior findings. To address these issues, we propose a research framework called Intersectional Neuroscience which adapts research procedures to...