Buddhism

Proposes that mental well-being can be attained through cultivating four types of mental balance: conative, attentional, cognitive, and affective.

theoretical

Meditation can produce a wide range of experiences beyond health benefits, including challenging and distressing ones, with interpretations and impacts varying greatly.

qualitative

Argues that the modern scholarly tendency to interpret Buddhist technical terms as referring to discrete meditative states of consciousness is based on an unquestioned assumption.

theoretical

Argues that integrating mindfulness-based approaches into medicine, psychology, neuroscience, and healthcare is valuable and timely.

editorial

Zen meditation produces a distinct EEG pattern of alpha wave changes and dehabituation of alpha blocking, indicating a specific state of consciousness different from sleep or hypnosis.

observational Sample size: 48

MBSR and MBCT have broad-spectrum antidepressant and antianxiety effects and decrease general psychological distress, with MBCT strongly recommended as an adjunctive treatment for unipolar depression.

review

Proposes that Buddhist teachings on sukha and nonafflictive emotions offer challenges and opportunities for empirical research on happiness and emotional well-being.

theoretical

Mindfulness questionnaires are useful and informative tools for assessing mindfulness, though they have shortcomings requiring additional work.

review

One-point meditation, but not compassion meditation, produced extreme increases in perceptual dominance durations during binocular rivalry, and monks showed longer motion-induced blindness disappearance durations compared to meditation-naive individuals.

observational Sample size: 76

Zen practitioners displayed a reduced duration of neural response linked to conceptual processing in default-network regions compared to controls.

observational cohort

Lower trait anxiety was associated with greater increase in frontal slow alpha interhemispheric EEG coherence during meditation, while higher trait anxiety was associated with greater increase in high-frequency heart rate variability.

observational cohort Sample size: 22

Meditation-induced light experiences reported by contemporary practitioners match typologies found in Buddhist texts and in scientific research on sensory deprivation and perceptual isolation.

qualitative

Argues that the core aspirations behind introducing mindfulness into mainstream contexts were initially focused on medicine and health care via MBSR, and later extended to other domains as evidence of its efficacy accumulated.

theoretical

Chan meditation practice was associated with a positive linear relationship between performance anxiety and performance quality, whereas the control group showed a negative relationship; meditation did not significantly improve performance quality.

RCT Sample size: 19

Longer median telomere length and lower percentage of short telomeres were associated with meditation expertise, and the absence of experiential avoidance and a greater sense of common humanity were significant predictors of telomere maintenance.

observational cohort Sample size: 40

Proposes that Buddhist meditation functions as a coordinated practice ecology, where mechanisms like attention and compassion acquire distinct roles through asymmetric dependencies.

theoretical

The major Myanmar Vipassanā traditions share Theravāda Buddhism's ethical and liberative framework but differ significantly in technique and pedagogy, showing creative continuity rather than doctrinal fragmentation.

qualitative historical-textual review

Argues that digital media promote openness and accessibility in Buddhist practice but challenge embodied rituals, aiding the commercialization and secularization of mindfulness.

qualitative

Argues that early Buddhist psychology can be integrated with contemporary psychotherapy to address the 'double bypass' of spiritual and psychological bypass, using processes like nonattachment, decentering, and compassion.

theoretical

Argues that every object-desire conceals an identity-desire, that maya is a relational condition where masks relate to masks, and that religion begins where psychological influence ends.

theoretical

Priority anchor for a working paper; the abstract is not available, so no findings can be derived.

theoretical

Argues that non-compensability is the missing structural mechanism connecting Buddhist practice to flourishing, and that the Equilibrium Geometry of Flourishing explains why acquisition without proportional Vairagya increases suffering.

theoretical

Argues that canonical sati functions as a retentive, ethically discriminating faculty within the Eightfold Path and jhāna practice, whereas contemporary clinical mindfulness selectively extracts present-moment observation and non-reactivity, losing the asubha dimension and the sati–samādhi linkage.

theoretical

Proposes that Buddhist psychology, with its focus on ignorance and attachment as causes of suffering, offers a complementary approach to Western psychology for addressing youth mental health issues.

theoretical

Argues that the divergence between Western scientific and Buddhist analyses of consciousness is categorial, not lexical, and that awareness as such has no scientific counterpart.

theoretical