Pediatric chronic pain is a significant public health problem. MBSR has been used in the treatment of a wide variety of clinical conditions, such as chronic pain, whether MBSR is effective for chronic pain in youth remains an empirical question. The proposed study is a two-arm randomized clinical trial examining MBSR for pediatric chronic pain. …
Continue reading “MBSR for the treatment of pediatric chronic pain”
Receiving a diagnosis and undergoing cancer treatment is associated with high levels of emotional distress and related symptoms (e.g., anxiety, depression, and fatigue). MBSR has been consistently shown to reduce symptoms of stress and mood disturbance among cancer patients. Despite this, the question of “how” MBSR works has not been adequately addressed; it is not …
Continue reading “How does MBSR improve psychological functioning for cancer patients?”
Evidence points to the role of stress in the inception and maintenance of substance use disorders. Mindfulness training (MT) has shown promise in a number of stress-related maladies. However, no studies have compared MT to empirically-validated treatments for substance use disorders or assessed its impact on stress provocation. 36 individuals with alcohol and/or cocaine use …
Continue reading “Mindfulness training as treatment and mechanistic probe for drug addiction”
Previous studies have provided some evidence that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) may be beneficial for patients with chronic pain. This effect may be mediated by an improved ability to regulate emotional responses to pain due to improved attentional control. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) are useful for measuring the time-course of anticipatory and pain-evoked responses and their …
Continue reading “Electrophysiological and behavioral assessment of a mindfulness-based pain management program for patients with chronic pain”
This study examines the effects of a contemplative education intervention for Asian Indian adolescents living and going to high school in Singapore. The intervention aims to (a) reduce adolescents’ perceived levels of life stress and (b) enhance their ability to regulate their attention. While relaxation techniques have generally been found effective in dealing with adolescent …
Continue reading “Study of mindfulness meditation on stress reduction and attention regulation in adolescents with mild learning disabilities”
Previous emotion regulation studies (Ochsner et al., 2004, Urry et al., 2006) have used reappraisal as a strategy to investigate neural mechanisms of down-regulating negative emotion. Compassion may also be viewed as a regulatory strategy to cope with negative emotion, which may differ in neural mechanism and positive behavioral outcomes. In a pilot study, we investigate …
Continue reading “Compassion meditation vs. cognitive reappraisal as emotion regulation strategies to negative stimuli: An fMRI investigation”
Mindfulness‐Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is an 8 week course that teaches participants to change their patterns of reacting to stress. To accomplish this goal, participants practice meditation to increase their ability to attend to emotions and develop the ability to attend to their patterns of reactivity. In theory, this awareness will eventually enable participants to …
Continue reading “Dissociable neural modes of self-reference and emotion regulation”
Prior studies have focused on the impact of mindfulness-based interventions on alleviating physical or psychological symptoms or difficulties (e.g., Teasdale et al., 2000; Ma & Teasdale, 2004), or on enhancing positive states, including mindfulness itself (E.g., Brown & Ryan, 2003). Relatively little work has focused on cognitive measures that might reflect the presence or absence …
Continue reading “Establishing mindfulness and mind wandering as mediators of patient benefit in MBCT”
A spirit of Ubuntu gestures towards both an embrace and a challenge that holds Others to greater moral accountability, and calls on them to be ethical subjects. Ubuntu is fundamental in both ethics and politics, and is relevant to the embodied politics of forgiveness after mass trauma and violence. I will elaborate on this notion …
Continue reading “Session V – Reparative Humanism: Exploring the Meaning of Ubuntu”
The objective of present study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a primary prevention program—“Mindfulness Education” (ME)—a classroom-based program designed to foster children’s mindful awareness, psychological well-being, and social-emotional competencies. This study will provide an examination of multiple areas of functioning—cognitive, affective, behavioural, interpersonal and physiological through the collection of data from multiple-informants (self-reports, peer …
Continue reading “Effectiveness of the Mindfulness Education Program on children’s social-emotional competence, psychological well-being, and stress reactivity”