Positive Psychological States in the Arc from Mindfulness to Self-Transcendence: Extensions of the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory and Applications to Addiction and Chronic Pain Treatment
Current Opinion in Psychology January 14, 2019 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.01.004 via Semantic Scholar
Summary
The Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory describes how mindfulness promotes positive emotion regulation and resilience through cognitive-affective mechanisms. This review extends the theory to explain how mindfulness fosters self-transcendence via upward spirals of decentering, attentional broadening, reappraisal, and savoring. Savoring induces absorptive experiences of oneness between subject and object, amplifying sensory-perceptual salience and affective meaning. Evidence suggests that inducing self-transcendent positive emotions and nondual states through mindfulness-based interventions may restructure reward processing, producing therapeutic effects on addictive behavior, such as opioid misuse, and chronic pain syndromes.
Study at a glance
| Design | review |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Inducing self-transcendent positive emotions and nondual states through mindfulness-based interventions may restructure reward processing and produce therapeutic effects on addictive behavior and chronic pain syndromes. |
Abstract
The Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory (MMT) is a temporally-dynamic process model of mindful positive emotion regulation that elucidates downstream cognitive-affective mechanisms by which mindfulness promotes health and resilience. Here we review and extend the MMT to explicate how mindfulness fosters self-transcendence by evoking upward spirals of decentering, attentional broadening, reappraisal, and savoring. Savoring is highlighted as a key means of inducing absorptive experiences of oneness between subject and object, amplifying the salience of the object while imbuing sensory-perceptual field with affective meaning. Finally, this article provides new evidence that inducing self-transcendent positive emotions and nondual states of awareness through mindfulness-based interventions may restructure reward processing and thereby produce therapeutic effects on addictive behavior (e.g., opioid misuse) and chronic pain syndromes.