PLoS One
January 1, 2024
Zhangyi Wang, Yue Zhu, Tingrui Wang et al.
During the Omicron pandemic, Chinese clinical first-line nurses showed moderate levels of innovative behavior, organizational innovation climate, and self-transcendence. Innovative behavior was positively correlated with organizational innovation climate and self-transcendence. Self-transcendence partially mediated the relationship between organizational innovation climate and innovative behavior, accounting for 41.7% of the effect. The findings suggest that fostering a supportive organizational climate and promoting self-transcendence could enhance nurses' innovative behavior, ultimately improving nursing quality during the pandemic.
PLoS One
January 1, 2024
Wolf Mehling, Irina A Strigo, Veronica Goldman et al.
A 2-minute mindful attention exercise guided by a smartphone app, repeated several times daily for 8 weeks, helped people with chronic low back pain. Pain intensity dropped from 4.8 to 3.1 on a 0-10 scale, and a combined measure of pain intensity and interference (PEG score) improved from 13.7 to 8.4. Twenty-one of 29 participants had at least a 30% improvement in PEG score. Participants reported becoming aware of their usual avoidance of pain, were surprised that pain sensations varied over time, and found that focusing on pain reduced its threat. Many described pain in 3D shapes with changing colors, temperature, and density. The approach may be a beneficial alternative to ignoring or distracting from pain.
PLoS One
October 6, 2023
Markus Kiefer, Verena Frühauf, Thomas Kammer
Objective performance measures and subjective ratings of visual awareness yield similar thresholds for detecting and discriminating visual stimuli, supporting the validity of both approaches. In a temporal two-alternative forced choice task, participants' accuracy in detecting stimulus presence and discriminating letter case was compared with their subjective ratings using the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS) at high and low contrast. Thresholds for objective and subjective measures showed a comparable pattern across tasks and contrast levels, suggesting that both methods provide converging information about the feature-content of a percept and are likely veridical measures of awareness.
PLoS One
March 22, 2023
W. Crone, Pelin Kesebir, Beverly Hays et al.
A two-phase randomized controlled trial tested an eight-week mindfulness training program for engineering graduate students. Compared to wait-list controls, participants who received the training showed statistically significant improvements in emotional health, increased positive affect, decreased negative affect, decreased neuroticism, and increased mindfulness. In the second phase, the intervention group also reported significantly greater satisfaction with their research. The authors suggest that mindfulness training could serve a valuable role in professional and personal development within graduate engineering education.
PLoS One
March 15, 2023
Rita Sleimen-Malkoun, Louise Devillers-Réolon, J. Temprado
A brief session of mindfulness meditation (MM) improves attention and cognitive flexibility more than an active listening control, regardless of prior meditation experience. In a within-subject experiment, 22 experienced meditators and 20 novices completed a Stroop task at baseline, after a 10-minute MM breathing exercise, and after a 10-minute attentive listening task. Both interventions led to faster reaction times compared to baseline, but MM produced larger improvements on both congruent and incongruent trials, which tap attention, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility. The findings suggest that even a single, short MM session can enhance cognitive performance without requiring previous practice.
PLoS One
January 20, 2023
Short mindfulness meditation interventions produce different effects depending on their focus. A brief focused-attention meditation improved classroom exam performance and increased a neural marker of attention (the P300 ERP component) compared to a self-compassion meditation or a control condition. Self-compassion meditation enhanced self-reported state self-compassion but did not affect exam scores or the neural attention measure. The findings suggest that even brief, single-session mindfulness practices can influence cognition and emotion in distinct ways.
PLoS One
January 1, 2023
Marloes J Huijbers, Carolien Wentink, Peter L B J Lucassen et al.
Adding Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) to supported protocolized discontinuation (SPD) did not significantly help patients stop antidepressant medication (ADM) more than SPD alone. In a cluster-randomized trial across 36 Dutch primary care practices, 44% of patients offered MBCT plus SPD discontinued ADM within six months, compared to 33% offered SPD alone—a difference that was not statistically significant. Only 27% of those assigned to MBCT completed the program. Participation was low overall: of about 3000 invited patients, 119 started the interventions and 92 completed all assessments. No serious adverse events occurred.
PLoS One
January 1, 2023
Mark S Nestor, Alec Lawson, Daniel Fischer
Practicing Transcendental Meditation (TM) for 20 minutes twice daily led to rapid and substantial reductions in stress, burnout, and insomnia among healthcare providers at three South Florida hospitals. After two weeks, symptoms of anxiety, depression, and somatization dropped by about 45%, while insomnia, emotional exhaustion, and well-being improved by 33%, 16%, and 11%, respectively. At three months, anxiety decreased by 62%, somatization by 58%, depression by 50%, insomnia by 44%, emotional exhaustion by 40%, and depersonalization by 42%, with well-being improving by 18%. A parallel control group showed no significant changes. The findings indicate TM offers meaningful psychological benefits in a high-stress healthcare setting.
PLoS One
July 14, 2022
Ellentika Chayadi, N. Baes, L. Kiropoulos
A systematic review of 36 studies (1,677 participants) found that mindfulness-based interventions (MBSR, MBCT, MBCR) produce moderate reductions in depression, anxiety, and cancer-related fatigue (CRF) in people with cancer. Effects were maintained at least three months after the intervention. Compared to control groups, the interventions were superior for anxiety and CRF at follow-up but not for depression. The authors conclude that these interventions reduce psychological distress in oncology populations.
PLoS One
May 4, 2022
A scoping review of mindfulness research finds that the field lacks a unified scientific definition of mindfulness, which hampers the interpretation and comparison of study results. The review identifies multiple conceptual and operational definitions used across studies, leading to inconsistent measurement and outcomes. The authors suggest that this conceptual ambiguity limits the ability to draw clear scientific conclusions about mindfulness's effects.
PLoS One
January 1, 2022
Jinsoo Koh, Maiko Takahashi, Yasuhiko Ohmae et al.
An 8-week mindfulness meditation program reduced impulsivity in 20 patients with Parkinson's disease. The Barratt Impulsiveness Scale score decreased from 59.5 to 55.2, a mean reduction of 4.2 points. Functional connectivity increased in the default mode network and right frontoparietal network, as measured by resting-state fMRI. The authors suggest that a brief mindfulness meditation program may help control impulsivity in Parkinson's disease and may alter brain network connectivity.
PLoS One
March 4, 2021
Marcel Franz, Barbara Schmidt, Holger Hecht et al.
Hypnosis can alter how people process and perceive sounds, but complete deafness is difficult to achieve. In an experiment with 48 participants, an auditory oddball task was performed under four conditions: hypnosis with a suggestion that an earplug blocked hearing, simulation of hypnosis, distraction by a film, and a control condition. Hypnosis and simulation both reduced target detection rates, response times, and the P3b brainwave amplitude compared to control and distraction conditions. Loudness ratings dropped only during hypnosis. Brain source analysis showed that a small set of neural areas involved in attention, sound discrimination, and response organization accounted for the differences. The authors suggest the term 'hypoacusis' (reduced hearing) is more accurate than 'deafness' for this effect.
PLoS One
February 23, 2021
Both meditation and physical exercise activate the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region linked to reward and decision-making. Using near-infrared spectroscopy, the study observed increased activity in this area during both activities, suggesting shared neural mechanisms.
PLoS One
January 1, 2021
Jennifer Huberty, Megan E. Puzia, Linda Larkey et al.
A survey of Calm app subscribers who used a sleep-related component in the prior 90 days found that most reported help falling asleep, staying asleep, and getting restful sleep. Nearly half of participants had a mental health diagnosis (anxiety, depression, or PTSD), and most of those reported that Calm helped improve symptoms. Using meditation components was associated with perceived improvement in anxiety and depression, but Sleep Stories and music/soundscapes were not. Severity of sleep disturbance moderated the link between using Calm components and reporting better sleep, but not between using components and mental health improvements.
PLoS One
January 1, 2021
Rui Miguel Costa, Arlindo Madeira, Matilde Barata et al.
Drinking a moderate dose of red wine (about 40.98 g of ethanol) in a wine bar designed for pleasurable drinking increases pleasure and arousal, slows the subjective passage of time, focuses attention on the present moment, and reduces body awareness. It also enhances imagination, insightfulness, originality of thoughts, and feelings of oneness with the environment, spiritual feelings, all-encompassing love, and profound peace. These changes occurred regardless of whether participants drank alone, in pairs, or in groups. Older age correlated with greater pleasure increases; younger age with greater fascination with the environment. The findings suggest that red wine in such a setting can trigger changes in consciousness similar to mystical-type states.
PLoS One
January 1, 2021
Alex Gamma, Thomas Metzinger
A 12-factor model describes the fine-grained phenomenal character of 'pure awareness' experiences reported by meditators. An online survey in five languages collected 1403 usable responses from a median-age 52-year-old sample evenly split by gender, mostly regular meditators (77.3%) free of diagnosed mental disorders (92.4%) and not using psychoactive substances regularly (84.0%). Vipassana (43.9%) and Zen (34.9%) were the most practiced techniques. Factor analysis of 92 items yielded 12 factors—including 'Time, Effort and Desire,' 'Peace, Bliss and Silence,' 'Wakeful Presence,' 'Luminosity,' 'Emptiness and Non-egoic Self-awareness,' and 'Witness Consciousness'—explaining 44% of variance. The model fits data moderately well and aligns with prior work on minimal phenomenal experience.
PLoS One
January 1, 2021
Elizaveta Solomonova, Claudia Picard-Deland, Iris L Rapoport et al.
During the first COVID-19 lockdown (April–May 2020), 34% of 968 survey participants reported increased dream recall. The most common dream themes centered on inefficacy, human threat, death, and pandemic imagery. Dream, bad dream, and nightmare frequency was highest among those with moderate to severe stress levels. Frequency of bad dreams, nightmares, and dreams about the pandemic, inefficacy, and death were associated with higher stress, depression, and anxiety symptoms. The findings support theories linking dream content to environmental susceptibility and stress reactivity, with dreams reflecting existential concerns during the lockdown.
PLoS One
February 13, 2020
Thomas F. Varley, Michael M. Craig, R. Adapa et al.
Fractal dimension of brain activity—a measure of complexity beyond simple randomness—is lower in patients with disorders of consciousness than in healthy volunteers. Using fMRI data, fractal dimension was computed for cortical functional connectivity networks, adjacency matrices, and BOLD time-series. Healthy volunteers (n=15) had the highest fractal dimensions, followed by patients in a minimally conscious state (n=10), and patients in a vegetative state (n=8). Decreases in fractal dimension correlated with decreasing level of consciousness regardless of injury mechanism. The findings support the hypothesis that consciousness is associated with brain complexity and that fractal structures may indicate proximity to a critical point between low- and high-entropy states.
PLoS One
January 1, 2020
Takayuki Niizato, Kotaro Sakamoto, Yoh-Ichi Mototake et al.
Integrated information theory (IIT), originally developed to measure consciousness, can reveal a new type of leadership in fish schools that other measures cannot detect. Applying IIT 3.0 to real fish schools (Plecoglossus altivelis) showed a discontinuity in the average integrated information 〈Φ(N)〉 for schools of four or more fish, a transition not observed with mutual information or transfer entropy. This discontinuity correlated with the emergence of leadership, defined not by group behavior but by autonomy or group integrity. Simulations with the Boids model produced different results from real fish, suggesting that IIT captures a unique aspect of collective dynamics.
PLoS One
January 1, 2020
Stefan Dürschmid, Christoph Reichert, Nike Walter et al.
Brain activity in the resting state shows scale-free, critical dynamics balanced between order and disorder, but a direct link to cognition has been missing. Using MEG recordings during mindfulness meditation, the authors found that scale-free near-critical dynamics originated only from broad-band high-frequency activity above 100 Hz, which is associated with action potential firing. During meditation, avalanche dynamics shifted toward a critical point by reducing neural noise, and the topography of avalanches differed from rest. Self-regulated attention during meditation can serve as a control parameter for criticality in scale-free brain dynamics.
PLoS One
January 1, 2020
Larissa Lusnig, Ralph Radach, Christina J Mueller et al.
Adept Zen meditators rated the emotional valence of positive and negative nouns as significantly more neutral after a meditation session, whereas a comparison group showed no change in valence ratings after a comparison intervention. The Zen group reported greater openness to experience and lower need for achievement and performance. No differential emotion effects of Zen meditation were found during lexical decision, but a global facilitation of all response times occurred after meditation, suggesting increased attentional resources. The findings indicate that meditation can down-regulate emotional sensitivity to high-level cognitive representations like words.
PLoS One
January 1, 2020
Alexandre Seillier, Alex A Martinez, Andrea Giuffrida
In a rat model of schizophrenia, low doses of THC (0.1 mg/kg) reversed social withdrawal and elevated anandamide levels caused by PCP, while higher doses (0.3, 1.0 mg/kg) worsened social deficits and disrupted dopamine neuron activity similarly to PCP alone. THC also activated the Akt/GSK3β pathway in a dose-dependent manner in both control and PCP-treated animals. These findings suggest that only low doses of THC may have beneficial effects on behavioral, neurochemical, and electrophysiological correlates of schizophrenia symptoms, potentially informing the debate on marijuana use as self-medication in patients.
PLoS One
July 15, 2019
Eric López Maya, Richard Olmstead, Michael R. Irwin
A randomized clinical trial compared a standardized mindfulness meditation program (MAPs) with health education (HE) among 76 Latino adults in Los Angeles, half Spanish-speaking and half English-speaking, who had moderate perceived stress. Depressive symptoms, measured by the Beck Depression Inventory, improved more in the MAPs group than in the HE group, with a mean difference of -2.2 points and a small effect size of 0.28. Similar benefits appeared in both language groups. Mindfulness also improved more with MAPs, but perceived stress did not differ between groups. The comparable efficacy in Spanish and English suggests that this community-based mindfulness intervention may help reduce depression risk in Latino adults facing social adversity.
PLoS One
May 9, 2019
Marco Schlosser, T. Sparby, S. Vörös et al.
About one in four regular meditators (25.6%) report having had particularly unpleasant experiences they attribute to their meditation practice. A survey of 1,232 regular meditators found that women and religious participants were less likely to report such experiences, while those with higher repetitive negative thinking, those practicing deconstructive meditation types (e.g., vipassana/insight meditation), and those who had attended a meditation retreat were more likely to report them. The findings suggest that unpleasant experiences are common and that meditation should not be viewed solely as a health-promoting technique; understanding when these experiences are constitutive elements of practice rather than mere negative effects could advance the field.
PLoS One
April 15, 2019
P. Fitzgerald, Jessica Yen, B. Watson
A single injection of ketamine produces opposite behavioral effects in stressed versus unstressed male mice. In mice subjected to chronic mild stress and unpredictable chronic stress, ketamine (10 or 30 mg/kg) decreased immobility and increased swimming in the forced swim test 24 hours later, indicating antidepressant-like effects. In unstressed mice, however, ketamine increased immobility and reduced swimming, opposite to its effects in stressed animals. These results suggest that chronic psychological stress interacts with ketamine to modulate its effects, reinforcing the relevance of the forced swim test and this mouse strain for studying stress-induced depression.