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...
PLoS One
July 19, 2019
Jordan T. Quaglia, Fadel Zeidan, Peter G. Grossenbacher et al.
64 citations
In social contexts, the dynamic nature of others' emotions places unique demands on attention and emotion regulation. Mindfulness, characterized by heightened and receptive moment-to-moment attending, may be well-suited to meet these demands. In particular, mindfulness may support more effective cognitive control in social situations via efficient deployment of top-down attention. To test this,...
PLoS One
July 15, 2019
Eric López Maya, Richard Olmstead, Michael R. Irwin
ObjectiveLatino immigrants experience acculturative stress and increased depression risk. Mindfulness meditation improves depressive symptoms, yet the vast majority of research has focused on English speaking populations.MethodsIn this randomized clinical trial with 2 parallel treatment groups, adults with moderate levels of perceived stress (n = 76) were recruited from the Los Angeles...
PLoS One
July 11, 2019
Daniella K. Villalba, Emily K. Lindsay, Anna L. Marsland et al.
59 citations
Mindfulness interventions have garnered significant attention as a complementary health treatment for many physical and psychological conditions. While some research has shown that mindfulness training can decrease psychological and physiological stress responses, it remains unclear whether mindfulness training impacts inflammation-a predictor of poor health outcomes. In addition, little...
PLoS One
May 9, 2019
Marco Schlosser, Terje Sparby, S. Vörös et al.
So far, the large and expanding body of research on meditation has mostly focussed on the putative benefits of meditation on health and well-being. However, a growing number of reports indicate that psychologically unpleasant experiences can occur in the context of meditation practice. Very little is known about the prevalence and potential causes of these experiences. The aim of this study was...
PLoS One
April 23, 2019
Roland R. Griffiths, Ethan Hurwitz, Alan K. Davis et al.
249 citations
Naturally occurring and psychedelic drug-occasioned experiences interpreted as personal encounters with God are well described but have not been systematically compared. In this study, five groups of individuals participated in an online survey with detailed questions characterizing the subjective phenomena, interpretation, and persisting changes attributed to their single most memorable God...
PLoS One
April 15, 2019
P. Fitzgerald, Jessica Yen, B. Watson
Major depression is a stress-linked disease with significant morbidity and the anesthetic drug ketamine is of growing interest in the treatment of depression, since in responsive individuals a single dose has rapid (within hours) antidepressant effects that can be sustained for over a week in some instances. This combination of fast action and a therapeutic effect that lasts far beyond the...
PLoS One
April 13, 2019
Patrick Vizeli, Matthias E. Liechti
37 citations
Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) increases oxytocin, empathy, and prosociality. Oxytocin plays a critical role in emotion processing and social behavior and has been shown to mediate the prosocial effects of MDMA in animals. Genetic variants, such as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), of the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) may influence the emotional and social effects of MDMA in humans. The...
PLoS One
March 8, 2019
Bernard J. Crespi, Natalie L. Dinsdale, Silven Read et al.
68 citations
The relationships of spirituality with human social cognition, as exemplified in autism spectrum and schizophrenia spectrum cognitive variation, remain largely unstudied. We quantified non-clinical levels of autism spectrum and schizotypal spectrum traits (using the Autism Quotient and the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief Revised) and dimensions of spirituality (using the Hardt...
PLoS One
February 6, 2019
Vince Polito, Richard J. Stevenson
The phenomenon of ‘microdosing’, that is, regular ingestion of very small quantities of psychedelic substances, has seen a rapid explosion of popularity in recent years. Individuals who microdose report minimal acute effects from these substances yet claim a range of long-term general health and wellbeing benefits. There have been no published empirical studies of microdosing and the current...
PLoS One
January 24, 2019
Spontaneous eye movements during focused-attention mindfulness meditation.
PLoS One
December 12, 2018
Matthew J. Hirshberg, Simon B. Goldberg, S. Schaefer et al.
33 citations
Mindfulness practices are increasingly being utilized as a method for cultivating well-being. The term mindfulness is often used as an umbrella for a variety of different practices and many mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) contain multiple styles of practice. Despite the diversity of practices within MBIs, few studies have investigated whether constituent practices produce specific...
PLoS One
November 7, 2018
Cassandra Vieten, Helané Wahbeh, B Rael Cahn et al.
124 citations
The science of meditation has grown tremendously in the last two decades. Most studies have focused on evaluating the clinical effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions, neural and other physiological correlates of meditation, and individual cognitive and emotional aspects of meditation. Far less research has been conducted on more challenging domains to measure, such as group and...
PLoS One
November 5, 2018
Itxaso Barberia, Ramon Oliva, Pierre Bourdin et al.
71 citations
Mortality is an obvious if uncomfortable part of the human condition, yet it is impossible to study its impact on anyone who experiences it. Reports of phenomena associated with death such as out-of-the-body (OBE) and near death experiences (NDE) can only be studied post-hoc, since it is impossible to design a scientific study where an experimental group experiences death (and returns) and a...
PLoS One
September 13, 2018
Terje Sparby, Ulrich Ott
11 citations
Research on meditation is advancing, but few studies about the motivations of meditators exist. Additionally, many forms and traditions of meditation have yet to be investigated. This study addresses both of these issues by presenting an overview of different forms of motivations found in contemporary Anthroposophic meditation practice. 30 Anthroposophic meditators were interviewed about their...
PLoS One
August 8, 2018
Stephen LaBerge, Kristen Lamarca, Benjamin Baird
59 citations
Lucid dreaming is a remarkable state of consciousness in which one is aware of the fact that one is dreaming while continuing to dream. Based on the strong relationship between physiological activation during rapid eye-movement sleep and lucid dreaming, our pilot research investigated whether enhancing cortical activation via acetylcholinesterease inhibition (AChEI) would increase the frequency...
PLoS One
February 14, 2018
Héléna Cassol, Benoît Pétré, Sophie Degrange et al.
131 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) refer to profound psychological events that can have an important impact on the experiencers' (NDErs) lives. Previous studies have shown that NDEs memories are phenomenologically rich. In the present study, we therefore aimed to extract the common themes (referred to as "features" in the NDE literature) reported by NDErs by analyzing all the concepts stored in the...
PLoS One
January 24, 2018
Math Janssen, Yvonne Heerkens, W. Kuijer et al.
Objectives The purpose of this exploratory study was to obtain greater insight into the effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) on the mental health of employees. Methods Using PsycINFO, PubMed, and CINAHL, we performed a systematic review in October 2015 of studies investigating the effects of MBSR and MBCT on various aspects of...
PLoS One
2018
Joseph R Isler, Raymond I Stark, Philip G Grieve et al.
A putative quantifier of consciousness, integrated information, was applied to preterm infant EEG data after novel pre-processing. Integrated information had a non-random structure as a function of the time lag over which it was computed. For most lags, it increased with age in early life, but even more so in infants exposed to Family Nurture Intervention (FNI), providing further evidence that...
PLoS One
December 6, 2017
Eric L Garland, Adam W. Hanley, Phillipe R. Goldin et al.
161 citations
Testing the mindfulness-to-meaning theory: Evidence for mindful positive emotion regulation from a reanalysis of longitudinal data.
PLoS One
October 31, 2017
Simon B. Goldberg, Raymond P. Tucker, Preston A. Greene et al.
134 citations
BACKGROUND: Despite an exponential growth in research on mindfulness-based interventions, the body of scientific evidence supporting these treatments has been criticized for being of poor methodological quality. OBJECTIVES: The current systematic review examined the extent to which mindfulness research demonstrated increased rigor over the past 16 years regarding six methodological features...
PLoS One
October 11, 2017
Raphael Vallat, Benoit Chatard, Mark Blagrove et al.
60 citations
Several studies have demonstrated that dream content is related to the waking life of the dreamer. However, the characteristics of the memory sources incorporated into dreams are still unclear. We designed a new protocol to investigate remote memories and memories of trivial experiences, both relatively unexplored in dream content until now. Upon awakening, for 7 days, participants identified...
PLoS One
September 5, 2017
Ausiàs Cebolla, Marcelo Demarzo, Patricia Silveira Martins et al.
186 citations
OBJECTIVES: Despite the long-term use and evidence-based efficacy of meditation and mindfulness-based interventions, there is still a lack of data about the possible unwanted effects (UEs) of these practices. The aim of this study was to evaluate the occurrence of UEs among meditation practitioners, considering moderating factors such as the type, frequency, and lifetime duration of the...
PLoS One
May 24, 2017
Jared R. Lindahl, Nathan E. Fisher, David J. Cooper et al.
468 citations
Buddhist-derived meditation practices are currently being employed as a popular form of health promotion. While meditation programs draw inspiration from Buddhist textual sources for the benefits of meditation, these sources also acknowledge a wide range of other effects beyond health-related outcomes. The Varieties of Contemplative Experience study investigates meditation-related experiences...
PLoS One
April 21, 2017
Emilia M. Lefevre, Gregory Medley, Timothy Reeks et al.
8 citations
Stress is known to modulate sensitisation to repeated psychostimulant exposure. However, there is no direct evidence linking glucocorticoids and sensitisation achieved by repeated administration of the NMDA receptor antagonist MK-801. We tested the hypothesis that co-administration of RU486, a glucocorticoid receptor (GR) antagonist, prior to repeated daily MK-801 injections would block the...