Drawing upon research in neuroscience, cognitive science, developmental psychology and education, as well as scholarship from contemplative traditions concerning the cultivation of positive development, we highlight a set of mental skills and socio-emotional dispositions that we believe are central to the aims of education in the 21(st) century. These include self-regulatory skills associated...
Intense meditation practices help to achieve a harmony between body and mind. Meditation practices influence brain functions, induce various intrinsic neural plasticity events, modulate autonomic, metabolic, endocrine, and immune functions and thus mediate global regulatory changes in various behavioral states including sleep. This brief review focuses on the effect of meditation as a self...
The effects of two kinds of meditation (open presence and focused) on the facial and physiological aspects of the defensive response to an aversive startle stimulus were studied in a Buddhist monk with approximately 40 years of meditation experience. The participant was exposed to a 115-db, 100-ms acoustic startle stimulus under the 2 meditation conditions, a distraction condition (to control...
Previous studies have documented the positive effects of mindfulness meditation on executive control. What has been lacking, however, is an understanding of the mechanism underlying this effect. Some theorists have described mindfulness as embodying two facets-present moment awareness and emotional acceptance. Here, we examine how the effect of meditation practice on executive control manifests...
BACKGROUND: Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) has demonstrated efficacy for alleviating cancer-related distress. Although theorized to be the means by which people improve, it is yet to be determined whether outcomes are related to the development or enhancement of mindfulness among participants. This study examined the effect of participation in an MBSR program on levels of mindfulness...
Neuroimaging data suggest a link between the spontaneous production of thoughts during wakeful rest and slow fluctuations of activity in the default mode network (DMN), a set of brain regions with high basal metabolism and a major neural hub in the ventral posteromedial cortex (vPMC). Meta-awareness and regulation of mind-wandering are core cognitive components of most contemplative practices...
Mindfulness training has well-documented effects on psychological health. Recent findings suggest that increases in both mindfulness and self-compassion may mediate these outcomes; however, their separate and combined effects are rarely examined in the same participants. This study investigated cross-sectional relationships between self-reported mindfulness, self-compassion, meditation...
The cognitive modulation of pain is influenced by a number of factors ranging from attention, beliefs, conditioning, expectations, mood, and the regulation of emotional responses to noxious sensory events. Recently, mindfulness meditation has been found attenuate pain through some of these mechanisms including enhanced cognitive and emotional control, as well as altering the contextual...
Hypertension affects a large proportion of urban African-American older adults.While there have been great strides in drug development, many older adults do not have access to such medicines or do not take them. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR)has been shown to decrease blood pressure in some populations. This has not been tested in low-income, urban African-American older adults....
The FASEB JournalApril 1, 2012Lap Ho, Patricia A. Bloom, Joan Griffiths Vega et al.
Caregiving for a dementia patient is associated with an increased risk for emotional distress, depression, dementia, physical health problems and death. Targeting caregivers as the recipients of interventions may greatly improve patient care. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is a clinical intervention based on simple meditation practices which have been shown to reduce stress and...
Meditation is a practice of concentrated focus upon the breath in order to still the mind. In this paper we have investigated an algorithm to classify rest and meditation, by processing of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals through the Wavelet and nonlinear methods. For this purpose, two types of EEG time series (before, and during meditation) of 25 healthy women are collected in the meditation...
Mindfulness meditation has been shown to promote emotional stability. Moreover, during the processing of aversive and self-referential stimuli, mindful awareness is associated with reduced medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) activity, a central default mode network (DMN) component. However, it remains unclear whether mindfulness practice influences functional connectivity between DMN regions and,...
OBJECTIVE: To examine whether metacognitive psychological skills, acquired in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), are also present in patients receiving medication treatments for prevention of depressive relapse and whether these skills mediate MBCT's effectiveness. METHOD: This study, embedded within a randomized efficacy trial of MBCT, was the first to examine changes in mindfulness...
Meditation comprises a series of practices mainly developed in eastern cultures aiming at controlling emotions and enhancing attentional processes. Several authors proposed to divide meditation techniques in focused attention (FA) and open monitoring (OM) techniques. Previous studies have reported differences in brain networks underlying FA and OM. On the other hand common activations across...
About one-third of cancer survivors suffer from severe chronic fatigue. Aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of mindfulness-based cognitive group therapy in reducing severe chronic fatigue in cancer survivors with mixed diagnoses. Participants (n = 100) were randomly selected from a cohort and allocated to an intervention and a waiting list condition. Analyses were based on 59...
Background: An appreciation of cognitive predictors of change in treatment outcome may help to better understand differential treatment outcomes. The aim of this study was to examine how rumination and mindfulness impact on treatment outcome in two group-based interventions for non-melancholic depression: Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). Method:...
Mindfulness meditation-the practice of attending to present moment experience and allowing emotions and thoughts to pass without judgment-has shown to be beneficial in clinical populations across diverse outcomes. However, the basic neural mechanisms by which mindfulness operates and relates to everyday outcomes in novices remain unexplored. Focused attention is a common mindfulness induction...
Most of the many studies on the efficacy of meditation on anxiety disorders over the past half century have been quantitatively studied and lacked consensus. Studies into the experiences of meditation practitioners are lacking. Taiwan has a high prevalence of generalized anxiety disorders (GAD), and Zen meditation is popular. This study provides a deeper understanding of Zen meditation practice...
Several cortical regions are reported to vary in meditation practitioners. However, prior analyses have focused primarily on examining gray matter or cortical thickness. Thus, additional effects with respect to other cortical features might have remained undetected. Gyrification (the pattern and degree of cortical folding) is an important cerebral characteristic related to the geometry of the...