If you’ve tried meditation, one of the first mental experiences you probably become aware of is that your mind doesn’t tend to stay in one place. “Mind wandering” is an extremely common occurrence, with studies suggesting it makes up nearly half of our waking lives. When our minds wander, they can go nearly anywhere—from negative …
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Among all school-based factors, teachers have the largest impact on student achievement. The teacher-student relationship accounts for much of this influence. Although many teacher education programs provide knowledge about effective teaching behaviors, few target for development the skills teachers’ employ to enact what is known. Bridging the gap between knowing about and being able to …
Bereavement is one of the most common and stressful human experiences, affecting nearly 8 million people per year in the United States. Following loss, yearning and rumination are repetitive thought processes that increase the risk for poor grief outcomes. Mindfulness Meditation (MM) training has been found to reduce unhelpful repetitive thought processes. However, research on …
The goals of the research grant were to examine the effects of mindfulness meditation training on pain and fear learning processes, in order to validate the efficacy of this practice in disorders involving fear of threatening stimuli (eg. anxiety, chronic pain). The effects long-term meditation training on fear learning and pain were assessed in highly …
Continue reading “Mindfulness and the neurophysiological substrates of fear conditioning”
Mindfulness was taught to teenagers with a history of depression as one strategy for being aware of maladaptive thinking patterns such as rumination. Mindfulness was also taught as an alternative to “getting stuck in your head”. Teenagers who received 8 weeks of this intervention, experienced a reduction in residual depression symptoms compared to teenagers who …
Continue reading “Mindfulness Intervention to Study the Neurobiology of Depression (MIND)”
Thousands of studies show that mindfulness interventions improve cognitive, affective, stress, and health outcomes, but very little experimental work attempts to explain the mechanisms underlying this broad range of effects. This study uses a novel smartphone training paradigm to experimentally dismantle the components of mindfulness training and test their effects on affective and stress outcomes. …
There is growing evidence that meditation practice can reduce the experience of pain. However, what is going on in the brain during meditation that causes this pain relief has been a mystery. We guessed that meditation might reduce pain by releasing natural brain chemicals called endogenous opioids. Endogenous opioids reduce pain via the same brain …
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Training in mindfulness meditation has been associated with more adaptive emotional and behavioral responding, as indicated by reductions in symptoms of a range of clinical disorders, increased psychological well-being in non-clinical populations, and reduced mind-wandering. Despite compelling evidence for a relationship between meditation and mental health, the mechanisms responsible for its salutary effects are largely …
Endogenous opioids have been repeatedly shown to be involved in the cognitive inhibition of pain. Mindfulness meditation, a practice premised on directing nonjudgmental attention to arising sensory events, reduces pain by engaging mechanisms supporting the cognitive control of pain. However, it was unknown if mindfulness-meditation-based analgesia is mediated by opioids, an important consideration for using …
As adolescents struggle with the multitude of physiological and socioemotional changes taking place during this developmental period, the goal of this study was to implement a mindfulness program for teens and measure both self-report assessments of emotional well-being (perceived stress, life satisfaction, positive and negative affect) and physiological responses to a laboratory social stressor (heart …
