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...