Up to 60% of women enrolled in substance use treatment meet criteria for both substance use disorder (SUD) and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), presenting with more severe clinical profiles and psychiatric disorders, higher relapse rates, and lower treatment gains and compliance with aftercare than women with either disorder alone. Although evidence suggests treating SUD …
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Transforming habits from the heart: From good intentions to reliable prosocial response
Good intentions are important to live a moral life, but they are not enough because people often do not act on them. Indeed, moving from thought to action often requires cognitive resources that can be elusive, in which case we rely on more automatic patterns of thinking and acting. When these automatisms are non-virtuous, individuals …
Motivating engagement with social justice issues through compassion training: A multi-method randomized control trial
Working towards social justice necessitates dominant group members’ willingness to share the feelings of oppressed outgroup members (outgroup empathy) and to engage in difficult intergroup dialogue. Nevertheless, empathic and behavioral engagement is especially avoided in social justice contexts due to the high demands/costs of such engagement. It is, however, possible to offset high demands and …
Mindfulness-to-Meaning theory and eudaimonic appraisals of positive autobiographical events
The Mindfulness-to-Meaning theory proposes that the established relationship between mindfulness and measures of wellbeing may be due to its effects on emotion regulation. More specifically, they argue that the practice of mindfulness evokes more flexible awareness and the ability to suspend our automatic thoughts, emotions, and actions in-the-moment. As such, it can help create distance …
A real-time fMRI study to link subjective experience with brain network dynamics during craving
The goal of this study is to investigate the first-person experiences of craving –thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, etc. –and link these experiences to brain activation patterns, to gain insights into craving and how to extinguish it. This study will use a novel technology, real time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rtfMRI) “neurofeedback,” in which brain activation …
Intracranial circuits underlying Deep Slow Breathing and its palliative effects
Francisco Varela believed that the present moment of experience coincided with transient patterns of synchronous oscillations between different neuronal populations. Our findings suggest that these transient patterns of synchronous oscillations throughout the brain are modulated by breathing (e.g., breathing as an organizing principle for neuronal oscillations). While current neuroscientific methods of brain stimulation are limited, …
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Cultivating mental imagery through prayer
Prayer is a cornerstone of religious life, practiced by over 50% of Americans on a daily basis(1). Prayer practices foster a variety of contemplative experiences with deep personal and cultural significance(2,3). For example, evangelical or charismatic Christians—who make up nearly 10% of the global population(4)—often report seeing visions that they experience as originating from an …
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Generalizing mindful emotion regulation: Toward a transdiagnostic approach to training emotion regulation with mindfulness
Emotion dysregulation, difficulties managing intense emotions, is common across many psychiatric disorders and is central to some of the most severe and difficult-to-treat populations in psychiatry. To immediately decrease suffering from emotions, individuals with emotion dysregulation often rely on destructive behaviors, including substance use and violence. Mindfulness may help prevent these problems, as it effectively …
Eudaimonia and sleep: Effects of a mindfulness intervention in caregivers of people with dementia
Unpaid, or informal, caregivers of dementia patients are more likely to experience heightened stress and a variety of adverse psychological and physical health outcomes as well as disturbed sleep. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly important to identify interventions that can promote psychological and physical well-being of caregivers. The overarching goal of this proposed study is …
Voluntarily regulated breathing practices and their effects on self-regulation, cognition, and problem solving under stress
Conscious breathing is an aspect of all forms of meditation and yoga. Emerging research indicates that the effects of controlled breathing on the mind-body system and concomitant mental states warrants further investigation. We propose a two-phase investigation of breathing practices during which we will: (1) systematically review the literature on reported effects of voluntarily regulated …
