IntroductionTo explore if a brief mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) leads to sustained, improved clinical outcomes in adolescents at-risk for type 2 diabetes (T2D).MethodsParticipants were 12–17y girls with overweight/obesity, elevated depression symptoms, and T2D family history participating in a randomized, controlled pilot trial of a six-session MBI vs. cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)...
Inner experience and intrapersonal communication research in sport psychology has been largely dominated by a focus on self-talk, which has typically been examined using retrospective self-report measures. Although the existing self-talk literature has addressed aspects of athlete’s inner experience, attempts to extend the theoretical scope of intrapersonal communication in sport has been...
With the emergence of the science of heroism there now exists both theoretical and empirical literature on the characteristics of our everyday hero. We seek to expand this inquiry and ask what could be the causes and conditions of a superhero. To address this we investigate the origins of mindfulness, Buddhist psychology and the assertion that its practitioners who have attained expertise in...
The present study examined the effects of mindfulness on depression and anxiety, both direct and indirect through the mediation of four mechanisms of emotional regulation: worry, rumination, reappraisal and suppression. Path analysis was applied to data collected from an international and non-clinical sample of 1151 adults, including both meditators and non-meditators, who completed an online...
Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body...
Objective: Studies on psychological techniques to reduce stroke-related anxiety and/or distress are limited. More scarce is research on tailoring such techniques to suit stroke survivors' needs, including the needs of those with aphasia. To address this gap, we report two sequential studies. Study 1 explored preferred psychological techniques (i.e., mindfulness and relaxation) and ways to...
Experienced meditators often report spontaneous visual imagery during deep meditation in the form of lights or other types of visual images. These experiences are usually interpreted as an "encounters with light" and gain mystical meaning. Contrary to the well-studied intentional and controlled visual imagery, spontaneous imagery is poorly understood, yet it plays an important role in...
Consciousness is a global activity of the nervous system. Its physiological and pathological mechanisms have been studied in relation to the natural sleep-wake cycle and various forms of normal or morbid unconsciousness, mainly in neurophysiology and clinical neurology. Neuropsychology has been more interested in specific higher brain functions, such as perception and memory and their...
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is a very prevalent disorder in primary care (PC). Most patients with GAD never seek treatment, and those who do seek treatment often drop out before completing treatment. Although it is an understudied treatment, Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) indicate preliminary efficacy for the treatment of GAD symptoms, but many patients with GAD present other...
The “extreme sports” of mountaineering and BASE Jumping are growing in popularity and are associated with significant risk of injury and death. In recent years there have also been increasing numbers of reports of reckless disregard and selfishness in the pursuit of mountaineering goals, including severe environmental degradation. Extant research has focused predominantly on personality...
Nightmares are defined as repeated occurrences of extremely dysphoric and well-remembered dreams that usually involve subjective threats to survival, security, or physical integrity. Generally, they occur during rapid eye movement sleep (REMS) and lead to awakenings with distress and insufficient overnight sleep. Nightmares may occur spontaneously (idiopathic) or as recurrent nightmares....
While life in general can be explained by the mechanisms of physics, chemistry, and biology, to many scientists and philosophers, it appears that when it comes to explaining consciousness, there is what the philosopher Joseph Levine called an "explanatory gap" between the physical brain and subjective experiences. Here, we deduce the living and neural features behind primary consciousness...
In this paper, we propose the following hypothesis: the hard problem of consciousness is in part an artifact of what we call the unitary approach to phenomenal consciousness. The defining mark of the unitary approach is that it views consciousness and phenomenality as inseparable. Giving up this conceptual commitment redefines, in a productive way, the explanatory tasks of the theory of...
Dreams are usually characterized by primary consciousness, bizarreness and cognitive deficits, lacking metacognition. However, lucid dreaming (LD) is a type of consciousness state during which the dreamer is aware of the fact that he or she is dreaming, without leaving the sleeping state. Brain research has found that LD shares some common neural mechanisms with metacognition such as...
The distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness has been influential in the field of consciousness studies. Both Block and Lamme proposed that access consciousness, or narrow cognitive accessibility, is related to a limited capacity working memory, and that phenomenal consciousness, or broad cognitive accessibility, is related to iconic memory or, more recently, to a fragile...
Dream experience (DE) represents a fascinating condition linked to emotional processes and the human inner world. Although the overlap between REM sleep and dreaming has been overcome, several studies point out that emotional and perceptually vivid contents are more frequent when reported upon awakenings from this sleep stage. Actually, it is well-known that REM sleep plays a pivotal role in...
Chronic widespread pain (CWP) is one of the most difficult pain conditions to treat due to an unknown etiology and a lack of innovative treatment design and effectiveness. Based upon preliminary findings within the fields of motivational psychology, integrative neuroscience, diaphragmatic breathing, and vagal nerve stimulation, we propose a new treatment intervention, motivational non-directive...
Flow describes a state of optimal experience that can promote a positive adaptation to increasing stress. The aim of the current study is to identify the ideal autonomic state for peak cognitive performance by correlating sympathovagal balance during cognitive stress with (1) perceived flow immersion and (2) executive task performance. Autonomic states were varied in healthy male participants...
Qigong is a Meditative Movement exercise that consists of mindful movements, regulation of breathing and attentional control. In this study we investigated whether Qigong practice might be associated with the affect and flow of its practitioners during the exercise. Although practitioners of Meditative Movement anecdotally describe flow-like experiences and strong effects on affect there are...
Electrophysiological recordings are usually used to study neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs). The aim of our present study was to use two detection tasks to dissociate the electrophysiological correlates of visual awareness from the post-perceptual processes. In immediate detection task, participants had to quickly report whether the stimulus was presented after stimulus, whereas in...
There has been increased interest in the relationships between religiosity, meditation practice and well-being, but there is lack of understanding as to how specific religious components and distinct meditation practices could influence different positive and negative psychological adjustment outcomes. The aim of this study was to assess the explanatory power of religious beliefs and the...
Owing to its benefits on various cognitive aspects, one's emotions, and well-being, meditation has drawn interest from several researchers and common public alike. We have different meditation practices associated with many cultures and traditions across the globe. Current literature suggests significant changes in the neural activity among the different practices of meditation, as each of...
Prior work by Radin et al. (2012, 2016) reported the astonishing claim that an anomalous effect on double-slit (DS) light-interference intensity had been measured as a function of quantum-based observer consciousness. Given the radical implications, could there exist an alternative explanation, other than an anomalous consciousness effect, such as artifacts including systematic methodological...
In the contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind debate the definition of the ontology of the Self is difficult if not downright dubious. Thus, different theories aim to provide an account, especially where further neuroscientific research could be implemented. To this extent, the identity of the Self is suggested to be pinpointed by virtue of its specific set of mechanical features...
Compassion-based interventions (CBIs) have been shown to be effective for increasing empathy and compassion, and reducing stress, anxiety, and depression. CBIs are based on constructive meditations where imagery abilities are essential. One of the major difficulties that participants report during the training is the difficulty related to imagery abilities. Virtual reality (VR) can be a useful...