PLoS One
December 2, 2021
Imke Hanssen, Vera Scheepbouwer, Marloes J. Huijbers et al.
12 citations
BackgroundMindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) are widely used in clinical and non-clinical populations, but little attention has been given to potential adverse effects (AEs).AimsThis study aimed to gain insight in the prevalence and course of AEs during Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for patients with bipolar disorder (BD).MethodThe current mixed-methods study was conducted as...
PLoS One
October 25, 2021
Annie Regan, Seth Margolis, Harriet de Wit et al.
18 citations
3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is a psychostimulant known for producing positive subjective effects and for enhancing social functioning and social connection in both clinical and recreational settings. Over the past two decades, scientists have begun to study the psychological effects of MDMA through rigorous placebo-controlled experimental work. However, most existing studies have...
PLoS One
October 6, 2021
Claudia Picard-Deland, Tore Nielsen, Michelle Carr
27 citations
The phenomenon of dreaming about the laboratory when participating in a sleep study is common. The content of such dreams draws upon episodic memory fragments of the participant's lab experience, generally, experimenters, electrodes, the lab setting, and experimental tasks. However, as common as such dreams are, they have rarely been given a thorough quantitative or qualitative treatment. Here...
PLoS One
July 1, 2021
Marie Therese Bartossek, Johanna Kemmerer, Timo Torsten Schmidt
43 citations
Flicker light stimulation can induce short-term alterations in consciousness including hallucinatory color perception and geometric patterns. In the study at hand, the subjective experiences during 3 Hz and 10 Hz stroboscopic light stimulation of the closed eyes were assessed. In a within-subjects design (N = 24), we applied the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (mood state), time...
PLoS One
March 17, 2021
Marcel O Bonn-Miller, Sue Sisley, Paula Riggs et al.
129 citations
IMPORTANCE: There is a pressing need for development of novel pharmacology for the treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Given increasing use of medical cannabis among US military veterans to self-treat PTSD, there is strong public interest in whether cannabis may be a safe and effective treatment for PTSD. OBJECTIVE: The aim of the present study was to collect preliminary data on...
PLoS One
March 4, 2021
Brandon L Peters, Jinxia Deng, Andrew L Ferguson
4 citations
G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) mediate intracellular signaling in response to extracellular ligand binding and are the target of one-third of approved drugs. Ligand binding modulates the GPCR molecular free energy landscape by preferentially stabilizing active or inactive conformations that dictate intracellular protein recruitment and downstream signaling. We perform enhanced sampling...
PLoS One
March 4, 2021
Marcel Franz, Barbara Schmidt, Holger Hecht et al.
Hypnosis is a powerful tool to affect the processing and perception of stimuli. Here, we investigated the effects of hypnosis on the processing of auditory stimuli, the time course of event-related-potentials (ERP; N1 and P3b amplitudes) and the activity of cortical sources of the P3b component. Forty-eight participants completed an auditory oddball paradigm composed of standard, distractor,...
PLoS One
February 23, 2021
Activation of the orbitofrontal cortex by both meditation and exercise: A near-infrared spectroscopy study.
PLoS One
January 7, 2021
Karsten Fatur
11 citations
The present study examined the patterns of use among a sample of 68 users of hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms in Slovenia. In compiling the lists of all the participants, 26 different plants/mushrooms, mixtures, or products were found to have been used. The main reason for beginning to use these substances was curiosity, and most people began using them in their 20s. The most used were...
PLoS One
2021
Naomi Kakoschke, Craig Hassed, Richard Chambers et al.
49 citations
Medical students commonly experience elevated psychological stress and poor mental health. To improve psychological wellbeing, a 5-week mindfulness-based lifestyle course was delivered to a first-year undergraduate medical student cohort as part of the core curriculum. This study investigated the effects of the program on mental health, perceived stress, study engagement, dispositional...
PLoS One
2021
Shih-Han Hung, Ching-Yung Hwang, Chun-Yen Chang
23 citations
People experience a healthy energy gained from the environment and an inner feeling, called the Qi experience. The flow experience has been a popular topic in Western studies, especially within the fields of psychology and health, and in all kinds of activities. Our current study used quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the relationship between the Qi experience and the flow...
PLoS One
2021
Alex Gamma, Thomas Metzinger
To develop a fine-grained phenomenological analysis of "pure awareness" experiences in meditators. An online survey in five language versions (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian) collected data from January to March 2020. A total of 92 questionnaire items on a visual analogue scale were submitted to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Out of 3627 submitted responses, 1403 were...
PLoS One
2021
Jennifer Huberty, Megan E. Puzia, Linda Larkey et al.
Use of mindfulness mobile apps has become popular, however, there is little information about subscribers' perceptions of app content and its impact on sleep and mental health. The purpose of this study was to survey subscribers to Calm, a popular mindfulness meditation app, to explore perceived improvements in sleep and mental health, evaluate what components of the app were associated with...
PLoS One
2021
Elizaveta Solomonova, Claudia Picard-Deland, Iris L Rapoport et al.
An upsurge in dream and nightmare frequency has been noted since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and research shows increases in levels of stress, depression and anxiety during this time. Growing evidence suggests that dream content has a bi-directional relationship with psychopathology, and that dreams react to new, personally significant and emotional experiences. The first lockdown...
PLoS One
2021
Rui Miguel Costa, Arlindo Madeira, Matilde Barata et al.
There is lack of research on effects of red wine on consciousness when drank in wine bars designed to enhance the pleasurableness of the wine drinking experience. Effects of a moderate dose of red wine (≈ 40.98 g of ethanol) on consciousness were examined in a naturalistic study taking place in a wine bar located in one of the most touristic areas of Lisbon, Portugal. One hundred two...
PLoS One
December 28, 2020
Sergio Hernández, Roberto Dorta‐Guerra, José Suero et al.
23 citations
OBJECTIVES: Our previous study showed that long-term practitioners of Sahaja Yoga Meditation (SYM) had around 7% larger grey matter volume (GMV) in the whole brain compared with healthy controls; however, when testing individual regions, only 5 small brain areas were statistically different between groups. Under the hypothesis that those results were statistically conservative, with the same...
PLoS One
November 30, 2020
Natália Bezerra Mota, Janaína Weissheimer, Marina Ribeiro et al.
71 citations
The current global threat brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has led to widespread social isolation, posing new challenges in dealing with metal suffering related to social distancing, and in quickly learning new social habits intended to prevent contagion. Neuroscience and psychology agree that dreaming helps people to cope with negative emotions and to learn from experience, but can dreaming...
PLoS One
November 25, 2020
Gerlinde C. Harb, Jon‐Håkon Schultz
27 citations
Children and adolescents who have experienced traumatic events demonstrate a variety of posttraumatic symptoms, including recurrent nightmares, as well as adverse reactions in the school setting. The current study examined nightmare symptoms, posttraumatic stress, sleep disturbance, and self- and teacher-reported school functioning of 64 youths in the Gaza Strip, ages 12 to 16, who have lived...
PLoS One
November 23, 2020
Nadine Farnes, Bjørn E. Juel, André S. Nilsen et al.
81 citations
Increased signal diversity/complexity of spontaneous EEG, but not evoked EEG responses, in ketamine-induced psychedelic state in humans.
PLoS One
October 14, 2020
Elliot Marseille, J. Kahn, B. Yazar-Klosinski et al.
55 citations
Background Chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a disabling condition that generates considerable morbidity, mortality, and both medical and indirect social costs. Treatment options are limited. A novel therapy using 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) has shown efficacy in six phase 2 trials. Its cost-effectiveness is unknown. Methods and findings To assess the...
PLoS One
July 23, 2020
Joshua M. Martin, Danyal Wainstein Andriano, Natália Bezerra Mota et al.
41 citations
Dream reports collected after rapid eye movement sleep (REM) awakenings are, on average, longer, more vivid, bizarre, emotional and story-like compared to those collected after non-REM. However, a comparison of the word-to-word structural organization of dream reports is lacking, and traditional measures that distinguish REM and non-REM dreaming may be confounded by report length. This problem...
PLoS One
February 21, 2020
Bheatrix Bienemann, Nina Stamato Ruschel, Maria Luiza Pesse Campos et al.
81 citations
Psilocybin, a substance mainly found in mushrooms of the genus psilocybe, has been historically used for ritualistic, recreational and, more recently, medicinal purposes. The scientific literature suggests low toxicity, low risk of addiction, overdose, or other causes of injury commonly caused by substances of abuse, with growing interest in the use of this substance for conditions such as...
PLoS One
February 13, 2020
Thomas F. Varley, Michael M. Craig, Ram Adapa et al.
Recent evidence suggests that the quantity and quality of conscious experience may be a function of the complexity of activity in the brain and that consciousness emerges in a critical zone between low and high-entropy states. We propose fractal shapes as a measure of proximity to this critical point, as fractal dimension encodes information about complexity beyond simple entropy or randomness,...
PLoS One
January 30, 2020
Vanessa Charland-Verville, D. Ribeiro de Paula, Charlotte Martial et al.
20 citations
The notion that death represents a passing to an afterlife, where we are reunited with loved ones and live eternally in a utopian paradise, is common in the reports of people who have encountered a “Near-Death Experience” (NDE). NDEs are thoroughly portrayed by the media but empirical studies are rather recent. The definition of the phenomenon as well as the identification of NDE experiencers...
PLoS One
2020
Takayuki Niizato, Kotaro Sakamoto, Yoh-Ichi Mototake et al.
Collective behaviours are known to be the result of diverse dynamics and are sometimes likened to living systems. Although many studies have revealed the dynamics of various collective behaviours, their main focus has been on the information processing performed by the collective, not on interactions within the collective. For example, the qualitative difference between three and four elements...