Psychosomatic Medicine
July 1, 2003
Richard J. Davidson, Jon Kabat‐zinn, Jessica R. Schumacher et al.
2,924 citations
An 8-week mindfulness meditation training program for healthy employees increased left-sided anterior brain activation, a pattern linked to positive emotion, and boosted antibody titers after an influenza vaccine compared with a wait-list control group. The magnitude of the brain activation increase predicted the size of the antibody response. These results indicate that a brief meditation intervention can measurably alter brain and immune function.
PLoS ONE
March 25, 2008
Antoine Lutz, Julie Brefczynski-Lewis, Tom Johnstone et al.
942 citations
During loving-kindness-compassion meditation, expert practitioners show greater brain activation in the insula and limbic regions when hearing emotional sounds, especially negative ones, compared to novices. This enhanced response correlates with self-reported meditation intensity. Experts also exhibit increased activity in the amygdala, temporo-parietal junction, and posterior superior temporal sulcus, suggesting improved detection of emotional vocalizations and mental state reasoning. The findings indicate that training in cultivating positive emotion alters neural circuits associated with empathy and theory of mind.
Annual Review of Clinical Psychology
December 11, 2018
Joseph Wielgosz, Simon B. Goldberg, Tammi R. A. Kral et al.
441 citations
Mindfulness meditation is increasingly used in mental health interventions and has influenced basic research on psychopathology. This review examines mindfulness meditation through clinical neuroscience, linking its core capacities to cognitive and affective constructs from the National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria. Effective applications are noted for depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and substance abuse, with emerging work on attention disorders, traumatic stress, dysregulated eating, and serious mental illness. Priorities for future research include identifying mechanisms, refining methods, and improving implementation. Mindfulness meditation shows promise for interventions, especially for psychiatric comorbidity, and its successes and challenges offer lessons for integrating contemplative traditions with clinical science.
Scientific Reports
November 22, 2019
Isaac N. Treves, Lawrence Y. Tello, Richard J. Davidson et al.
118 citations
A meta-analysis of 15 studies (17 samples, 879 adults) found a small positive relationship between mindfulness and the accuracy of body awareness, with an effect size of g = 0.21. When analyzed by study design, only randomized controlled trials showed a significant link (g = 0.20). Heterogeneity was low, but low fail-safe N estimates reduce confidence in the findings. The results suggest a small but potentially detectable association between mindfulness and body awareness accuracy.
April 8, 2024
Saampras Ganesan, Aki Tsuchiyagaito, Greg J. Siegle et al.
2 citations
preprint
Meditation practices, which have been adapted into manualized interventions for conditions like depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety, show therapeutic promise, but their neuroscientific basis remains unclear. Current neuroimaging studies rely on small, heterogeneous datasets that vary in practice types, participant experience, clinical targets, and imaging methods, limiting generalizability and replicability. To address this, the ENIGMA-Meditation consortium was formed as a global collaboration to conduct systematic meta- and mega-analyses of distributed neuroimaging data using standardized methods. This framework aims to improve statistical power and rigorously characterize the neural mechanisms underlying meditation's effects on psychological and cognitive attributes, advancing the field of contemplative neuroscience.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
May 10, 2024
Christina Maher, Lea Tortolero, Daniel D. Cummins et al.
1 citation
preprint
Loving-kindness meditation (LKM) increases gamma power and alters the duration of beta and gamma oscillatory bursts in the amygdala and hippocampus of first-time meditators. These changes were specific to periodic features of neural activity, not aperiodic ones. The findings reveal how LKM modulates limbic brain activity, offering insight into the neural basis of meditation's effects on emotional regulation and well-being.