Drawing on culturally sensitive approaches to the study of dissociation, in the present meta-analysis, we aimed to obtain pooled prevalence estimates for dissociative disorders and spirit possession and to test for the effect of nation-level individualism scores on the occurrence of pathological dissociation. Pooled odds ratios ( OR s) for the probability of women presenting with a dissociative...
Emergent phenomena (EP)—sudden unusual mental or somatic experiences—are surprisingly widespread. Although EP often lead to positive impacts on well-being, they are sometimes followed by intense suffering. We examine potential risk factors and protective factors for EP and related suffering using logistic regression on general-population survey data (n = 3,133). The four strongest risk factors...
Despite growing popularity, associations between dosage and outcomes in meditation app interventions have not been established. We examined this relationship using a range of operationalizations of dosage (e.g., minutes of use, days of use, number and type of activities completed) and strategies for modeling outcomes (e.g., ordinary least squares regression, multilevel modeling, latent class...
Estimates suggest that meditation use is comparable to mental-health-service access in the United States. Understanding meditation-related adverse effects (AEs) is therefore critical. We aimed to (a) estimate the incidence of meditation-related unusual experiences and AEs using different methods and (b) identify sociodemographic and health-related characteristics predicting their incidence. We...
Understanding why interventions work is essential to optimizing them. Although mechanistic theories of meditation-based interventions (MBIs) exist, empirical evidence is limited. We randomly assigned 662 adults (79.9% reported clinical levels of anxiety or depressive symptoms) to a four-week smartphone-based MBI or wait-list control condition early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychological...
Bidirectional associations between changes in symptoms and alliance are established for in-person psychotherapy. Alliance may play an important role in promoting engagement and effectiveness within unguided mobile health (mHealth) interventions. Using models disaggregating alliance and psychological distress into within- and between-person components (random intercept cross-lagged panel model),...
Depression is highly recurrent, even following successful pharmacological and/or psychological intervention. We aimed to develop clinical prediction models to inform adults with recurrent depression choosing between antidepressant medication (ADM) maintenance or switching to mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). Using previously published data (N = 424), we constructed prognostic models...
Research on the adverse effects of mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) has been sparse and hindered by methodological imprecision. The 44-item Meditation Experiences Interview (MedEx-I) was used by an independent assessor to measure meditation-related side effects (MRSEs) following three variants of an 8-week program of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (n = 96). Each item was queried for...
Poletti, Gebhardt, Krueger, and Raballo (2017) raise the important issue of a careful phenomenological approach in understanding the experience of psychosis in their helpful commentary on our recent article (Bell, Mills, Modinos, & Wilkinson, 2017). To summarize their main concern, they argue that the breadth of subjective and intersubjective experience in psychosis cannot be reduced to...
The positive symptoms of psychosis largely involve the experience of illusory social actors and yet our current measures of social cognition, at best, only weakly predict their presence. We review evidence to suggest that the range of current approaches in social cognition is not sufficient to explain the fundamentally social nature of these experiences. We argue that social agent...
This review investigates how recent neuroimaging findings on vulnerability for depression and the mechanisms of mindfulness may serve to inform and enhance the understanding that is guiding the use of mindfulness training in the prevention and treatment of recurrent and chronic depression. In particular, we review evidence suggesting that alterations in default-mode-network activity and...
Sleep paralysis (SP) is a brief paralysis experienced when falling asleep or waking up. It is often accompanied by vivid imagery and extreme fear. In addition to the fear during episodes, people often report marked distress following episodes. With the goal of developing an integrative account of SP postepisode distress, we examined the effects of several potential determinants of postepisode...