The maintenance/strength of self is a very core concept in Western psychology and is particularly relevant to egoism, a process that draws on the hedonic principle in pursuit of desires. Contrary to this and based on Buddhism, a nonself-cultivating process aims to minimize or extinguish the self and avoid desires, leading to egolessness or selflessness. The purpose of this paper is to present...
Our Western society is characterized by multitasking, competition, and constant time pressure. Negative effects of stress for the individual (anxiety, depression, somatic complaints) and for organizations and society (costs due to work absence) are very high. Thus, time-efficient self-help interventions to address these issues are necessary. This study assessed the effects of daily mindfulness...
Context: Dissociation is understood as maladaptive coping and is common in children and adolescents. Treatment outcome studies show improvement in comorbid conditions suggesting the need to implement programs that target dissociative pathology. Aim: To study the effect of practicing mindfulness among adolescents diagnosed with dissociative disorders. Settings and Design: It was a hospital-based...
Research suggests that an 8-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) course may be effective for generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). To compare changes in anxiety levels among participants with GAD randomly assigned to MBCT, cognitive-behavioural therapy-based psychoeducation and usual care. In total, 182 participants with GAD were recruited (trial registration number: CUHK_CCT00267) and...
Normal aging is known to be accompanied by loss of brain substance. The present study was designed to examine whether the practice of meditation is associated with a reduced brain age. Specific focus was directed at age fifty and beyond, as mid-life is a time when aging processes are known to become more prominent. We applied a recently developed machine learning algorithm trained to identify...
Disengaging from maladaptive thinking is an important imperative in the treatment of depression. Mindfulness training is aimed at helping patients acquire relevant skills for this purpose. It remains unclear, however, whether this practice is helpful when patients are acutely depressed. In order to investigate effects of mindfulness on symptoms and self-regulatory capacities in this group, the...
This study evaluated the effects of meditation programs on nurses' power and quality of life. In this study, Barrett's power theory derived from Rogers' unitary human being science was used as a theoretical framework. A randomized controlled design with 50 recruited and randomly allocated participants was used. The results demonstrated that the eight-week meditation program significantly...
Mindfulness meditation training interventions have been shown to improve markers of health, but the underlying neurobiological mechanisms are not known. Building on initial cross-sectional research showing that mindfulness meditation may increase default mode network (DMN) resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) with regions important in top-down executive control (dorsolateral prefrontal...
Mindfulness practice is beneficial for emotion regulation; however, the neural mechanisms underlying this effect are poorly understood. The current study focuses on effects of attention-to-breath (ATB) as a basic mindfulness practice on aversive emotions at behavioral and brain levels. A key finding across different emotion regulation strategies is the modulation of amygdala and prefrontal...
Arch et al. (2014) demonstrated that brief self-compassion meditation training (SCT) dampened sympathetic (salivary alpha-amylase) and subjective anxiety responses to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), relative to attention and no-instruction control conditions. The present study examined baseline predictors and moderators of these SCT intervention effects. Baseline characteristics included...
Abstract: Dual-process models from neuroscience suggest that addiction is driven by dysregulated interactions between bottom-up neural processes underpinning reward learning and top-down neural functions subserving executive function. Over time, drug use causes atrophy in prefrontally mediated cognitive control networks and hijacks striatal circuits devoted to processing natural rewards in...
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Pain, which accompanies almost every third Pole, is an ever greater medical, psychological and social challenge. Relieving pain, and chronic one in particular, is now becoming one of the most important tasks for contemporary health care systems. It involves searching for efficacious therapeutic methods, not only with respect to pharmacotherapy, but also psychotherapy, physiotherapy, surgery,...
The aim of this paper is a short overview of the book of Evan Thompson Wak ing, Dreaming, Being.Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, with some polemic remarks.Thompson presents an interest ing approach to the problem of cognition, knowledge and selfknowledge -the problems considered in philosophy, psychology, neurosciences, which -if they interact -create an...
Body awareness has been proposed as one of the major mechanisms of mindfulness interventions, and it has been shown that chronic pain and depression are associated with decreased levels of body awareness. We investigated the effect of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) on body awareness in patients with chronic pain and comorbid active depression compared to treatment as usual (TAU; N =...
Introduction: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) not only negatively impacts upon a person's life, but it is also seen as an intermediate stage on the progression to Alzheimer's Disease (AD), and therefore warrants early intervention. However, there is currently no effective pharmacological treatment approved for MCI. There is a paucity of evidence that non-pharmacological interventions such as...
Background Sex addiction is a disorder that can have serious adverse functional consequences. Treatment effectiveness research for sex addiction is currently underdeveloped, and interventions are generally based on the guidelines for treating other behavioral (as well as chemical) addictions. Consequently, there is a need to clinically evaluate tailored treatments that target the specific...
The goal of this study was to verify whether association of aromatherapy with essential oils of Satureja brevicalyx or Satureja boliviana and mindfulness meditation can reduce anxiety levels in humans. A randomized experimental trial was carried out with 108 participants who were divided into 6 groups, comprising a waiting list control group and five experimental groups. Aromatherapy was...
Background and objectives: The aim of this study was examining the effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive group therapy on the quality of life and hope in the patients with coronary heart disease. Methods: The present study was quasi-experimental with pre-test, post-test and follow-up with control group. To fulfill the study, 30 patients were selected randomly and were assigned into...
Mindfulness intervention is a psychotherapy based on the Buddhist practice of meditation, combining the theories and methodology of contemporary psychology. The empirical research in recent years has indicated that mindfulness intervention yields favorable results including reduction of depression relapse, alleviation of the symptoms of depression and anxiety, reduction of substance abuse,...