Humans spend considerable time contemplating the minds of others. But this ability is not limited to external agents-we also turn the lens for reading minds inward, reflecting on our own thoughts, emotions, and sense of self. Some processes involved in reasoning about minds may rely on shared mechanisms, while others may be specific to the agent under consideration. We developed a paradigm...
Little is known about the neurocognitive underpinnings of forming social connections. In this study, we tested whether default mode network (DMN) inter-brain synchrony (which prior work has linked to interpersonal alignment, or 'seeing eye-to-eye') predicts feelings of connection during conversations. Seventy pairs of strangers engaged in shallow or deep conversations while brain activity was...
Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying the impact of psychedelics on social perception and cognition may be instrumental to unravel their therapeutic potential. We conducted a pharmacoimaging study to examine ayahuasca's effects on a key theory of mind region, at the core of the third visual pathway (TVP) - the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), which is involved in facial...
Loneliness, which has reached an all-time high in the United States, has been linked to reduced self-reported empathy. Loving kindness meditation (LKM) is aimed at extending love and kindness to others and has been shown to increase empathy. But whether LKM can reduce loneliness, and whether this corresponds to higher levels of trait empathy, state empathy, and/or neural empathic responding,...
Mental time travel enables humans to project life episodes into the future, shaping present behaviour through episodic future thinking. This study explored the effects of repeated mental time travel from the present to the end of life on the time perception and emotional experiences of young adults. Unlike previous studies that focused solely on a single moment (present or death), we introduced...
Compassion meditation (CM) is a promising intervention for enhancing compassion, although its active ingredients and neurobiological mechanisms are not well-understood. To investigate these, we conducted a three-armed placebo-controlled randomized trial (N = 57) with longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We compared a 4-week CM program delivered by smartphone application...
Abstract Dampened behavioral inhibition and overactive behavioral approach motivation systems (i.e. BIS/BAS) are associated with cannabis use disorder (CUD), although the underlying neural mechanisms of these alterations have not yet been examined. The brain’s executive control network (ECN) plays a role in decision-making and is associated with BIS/BAS. In this study, we tested the hypothesis...
Evaluating associations between the five-factor personality domains and resting-state functional connectivity networks (e.g. default mode network, DMN) highlights distributed neurobiological systems linked to behaviorally relevant phenotypes. Establishing these associations can highlight a potential underlying role for these neural pathways in related clinical illness and treatment response....
Focused attention meditation (FAM) is a basic meditation practice that cultivates attentional control and monitoring skills. Cross-sectional studies have highlighted high cognitive performance and discriminative neural activity in experienced meditators. However, a direct relationship between neural activity changes and improvement of attention caused by meditation training remains to be...
The bipolar valence-arousal model is assumed by many to be an underlying structure of conscious experience of core affect and emotion. In this work, we compare three versions of the bipolar valence-arousal model at the neural domain, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Specifically, we systematically contrast three models of arousal: model 1-'arousal as a separate quale from...
Mindfulness training ameliorates clinical and self-report measures of depression and chronic pain, but its use as an emotion regulation strategy-in individuals who do not meditate-remains understudied. As such, whether it (i) down-regulates early affective brain processes or (ii) depends on cognitive control systems remains unclear. We exposed meditation-naïve participants to two kinds of...
Abstract Mindfulness meditation training has been shown to increase resting-state functional connectivity between nodes of the frontoparietal executive control network (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex [DLPFC]) and the default mode network (posterior cingulate cortex [PCC]). We investigated whether these effects generalized to a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course and tested for...
The subjective and behavioral effects of intracranial electrical stimulation (iES) have been studied for decades, but there is a knowledge gap regarding the relationship between the magnitude of electric current and the type, intensity and valence of evoked subjective experiences. We report on rare iES data from 18 neurosurgical patients with implanted intracranial electrodes in the...
Intranasal oxytocin (OT) has previously been found to increase spirituality, an effect moderated by OT-related genotypes. This pre-registered study sought to conceptually replicate and extend those findings. Using a single dose of intranasal OT vs placebo (PL), we investigated experimental treatment effects, and moderation by OT-related genotypes on spirituality, mystical experiences, and the...
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and its main oscillatory feature, frontal theta, have been related to the processing of recent emotional memories. As memories constitute much of the source material for our dreams, we explored the link between REM frontal theta and the memory sources of dreaming, so as to elucidate the brain activities behind the formation of dream content. Twenty participants...
Social rejection is a distressing and painful event that many people must cope with on a frequent basis. Mindfulness-defined here as a mental state of receptive attentiveness to internal and external stimuli as they arise, moment-to-moment-may buffer such social distress. However, little research indicates whether mindful individuals adaptively regulate the distress of rejection-or the neural...
Abstract Sleep suffers during adolescence and is related to academic, emotional and social behaviors. How this normative change relates to ongoing brain development remains unresolved. The default mode network (DMN), a large-scale brain network important for complex cognition and socioemotional processing, undergoes intra-network integration and inter-network segregation during adolescence....
Loss or reduction of awareness is common in neuropsychiatric disorders and culturally influenced dissociative phenomena but the underlying brain mechanisms are poorly understood. fMRI was combined with suggestions for automatic writing in 18 healthy highly hypnotically suggestible individuals in a within-subjects design to determine whether clinical alterations in awareness of thought and...
Experiences such as mind-wandering illustrate that cognition is not always tethered to events in the here-and-now. Although converging evidence emphasises the default mode network (DMN) in mind-wandering, its precise contribution remains unclear. The DMN comprises cortical regions that are maximally distant from primary sensory and motor cortex, a topological location that may support the...
The oxytocin (OT) system, critically involved in social bonding, may also impinge on spirituality, which is the belief in a meaningful life imbued with a sense of connection to a Higher Power and/or the world. Midlife male participants (N = 83) were randomly assigned to receive intranasal OT or placebo. In exploratory analyses, participants were also genotyped for polymorphisms in two genes...
Distraction and rumination are distinct response styles that determine how an individual deals with negative thoughts and feelings. Rumination is accompanied by an elevated self-focus, which is associated with increased resting state functional connectivity and decreased reactivity within the default mode network. Interestingly, the NMDA receptor antagonist ketamine reduces functional...
Happiness refers to people's cognitive and affective evaluation of their life. Why are some people happier than others? One reason might be that unhappy people are prone to ruminate more than happy people. The default mode network (DMN) is normally active during rest and is implicated in rumination. We hypothesized that unhappiness may be associated with increased default-mode functional...
Recent studies indicate that mindfulness meditation training interventions reduce stress and improve stress-related health outcomes, but the neural pathways for these effects are unknown. The present research evaluates whether mindfulness meditation training alters resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) of the amygdala, a region known to coordinate stress processing and physiological...
Emotion regulation research has primarily focused on techniques that attenuate or modulate the impact of emotional stimuli. Recent evidence suggests that this mode regulation can be problematic in the context of regulation of emotion elicited by the suffering of others, resulting in reduced emotional connectedness. Here, we investigated the effects of an alternative emotion regulation technique...
Meditation has been shown to improve creativity in some situation. However, little is known about the brain systems underling insight into a problem when the person fails to solve the problem. Here, we examined the neural correlation using Chinese Remote Association Test, as a measure of creativity. We provide a solution following the failure of the participant to provide one. We examine how...