The attentional blink (AB) is a reduced ability to detect a stimulus presented too quickly (~500ms) after a previously detected stimulus. Mindfulness meditation reduces the AB, and has been explained in terms of the altered attentional resource allocation skills of meditators (Slagter et al., 2007). However, mindfulness meditation also increases positive affect (Davidson et al., 2003), and posi...

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 evaluati...

BACKGROUND Chronic pain patients increasingly seek treatment through mindfulness meditation. PURPOSE This study aims to synthesize evidence on efficacy and safety of mindfulness meditation interventions for the treatment of chronic pain in adults. METHOD We conducted a systematic review on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with meta-analyses using the Hartung-Knapp-Sidik-Jonkman method fo...

Most studies of meditation have focused on "actual affect" (how people actually feel). We predict that meditation may even more significantly alter "ideal affect" (how people ideally want to feel). As predicted, meditators ideally wanted to feel calm more and excited less than nonmeditators, but the groups did not differ in their actual experience of calm or excited states (Study 1). We ruled o...

Recent studies show that a single bout of meditation can impact information processing. We were interested to see whether this impact extends to attentional focusing and the top-down control over irrelevant information. Healthy adults underwent brief single bouts of either focused attention meditation (FAM), which is assumed to increase top-down control, or open monitoring meditation (OMM), whi...

Meditation practices aim at modifying the emotions by reducing reactivity to both pleasant and unpleasant emotions (Sperduti et al., 2012; Reva et al., 2014).Meditation also regulates the attention by reducing distractibility and directing focused attention to the object of meditation (Sperduti et al., 2012). In many meditation techniques attention is directed to ongoing experiences without the...

In this study, attentional processing in relation to mindfulness meditation was investigated. Since recent studies have suggested that mindfulness meditation may induce improvements in attentional processing, we have tested 20 expert mindfulness meditators in the attention network test. Their performance was compared to that of 20 age- and gender-matched controls. In addition to attentional net...

CONTEXT With the current globalization of the world's economy and demands for enhanced performance, stress is present universally. Life's stressful events and daily stresses cause both deleterious and cumulative effects on the human body. The practice of meditation might offer a way to relieve that stress. OBJECTIVE The research team intended to study the effects of meditation on stress-induc...

BACKGROUND Mindfulness meditation interventions improve a variety of health conditions and quality of life, are inexpensive, easy to implement, have minimal if any side effects, and engage patients to take an active role in their treatment. However, the group format can be an obstacle for many to take structured meditation programs. Internet Mindfulness Meditation Intervention (IMMI) is a progr...