European Journal of Pain
April 20, 2020
Jelle Zorn, Oussama Abdoun, Romain Bouet et al.
55 citations
Mindfulness meditation reduces the unpleasantness of pain without lowering its perceived intensity, and this effect is stronger in expert meditators than in novices. In a cross-sectional study, participants practiced Open Monitoring meditation or attentional distraction while receiving thermal pain stimuli of varying duration. Meditation lowered unpleasantness ratings compared to distraction in both groups. Expert meditators reported less pain catastrophizing, showed a greater separation between sensory and affective pain processing during long stimuli, and this uncoupling carried over into the control condition. Higher pain catastrophizing scores predicted weaker sensory-affective uncoupling during long stimuli and higher pain intensity ratings during short stimuli. The findings indicate that mindfulness specifically targets the emotional dimension of pain and that pain catastrophizing interferes with this process.
Consciousness and cognition
February 1, 2019
Oussama Abdoun, Jelle Zorn, Stefano Poletti et al.
44 citations
A meditation training protocol helped novices accurately describe their mental states during two types of meditation: focused attention and open monitoring. After several weeks of daily practice, participants' self-reported ratings of their experience (i) differed between the two meditation states, (ii) reflected how much they had practiced and how tired they felt, and (iii) matched changes in their reaction times during a task. These patterns were better explained by features of daily practice than by a tendency to give socially desirable answers. The results suggest that novice practitioners can reliably report their inner experience, supporting further study of this training approach.
Psychosomatic Medicine
March 31, 2021
Jelle Zorn, Oussama Abdoun, Sandrine Sonié et al.
32 citations
Cognitive defusion—a form of psychological distancing from internal experiences—plays a central role in how mindfulness meditation regulates pain, especially the unpleasantness aspect. Expert meditators with over 10,000 hours of practice reported much lower pain catastrophizing (6.9 vs. 17.2) and higher cognitive defusion (39.4 vs. 28.9) than novices after two days of training. Across all participants, pain catastrophizing and cognitive defusion were strongly and specifically linked, and only cognitive defusion uniquely predicted pain unpleasantness after accounting for other factors. This suggests that cultivating cognitive defusion, rather than other mindfulness-related processes, may be key to reducing the distressing experience of pain.
European Journal of Pain
April 2, 2021
Stefano Poletti, Oussama Abdoun, Jelle Zorn et al.
25 citations
How people respond to pain depends on psychological mechanisms, beliefs, and expectations. Comparing 32 novices who received short meditation training with 30 experts (over 10,000 lifetime hours of meditation), five phenomenological clusters emerged from interviews describing pain response strategies: experiential avoidance-suppression, volitional agency-distanciation, positive cognitive reappraisal and flexibility, metacognitive insights about mental processes, and deconstructing suffering through insights while recognizing shared human suffering. Expert meditators predominantly populated the last two clusters. Each cluster correlated with a unique profile of self-reported pain intensity, unpleasantness, avoidance, openness, vividness, and blissfulness during an experimental thermal pain task. The findings suggest meditation expertise shapes the meaning and experience of pain through metacognitive mechanisms.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
December 6, 2023
Sébastien Czajko, Jelle Zorn, Loïc Daumail et al.
5 citations
preprint
Short mindfulness-based interventions improve well-being, cognition, and clinical symptoms, but they are considered early steps on a longer transformative path that may produce lasting trait changes. Little is known about the brain correlates of these meditation traits.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
July 3, 2026
Sébastien Czajko, Jelle Zorn, Oussama Abdoun et al.
Nondual meditation, specifically Open Presence (OP) practice, is associated with reduced bodily self susceptibility and increased large-scale integration of functional brain networks. Expert meditators with over 10,000 hours of practice showed lower global network eccentricity during OP compared to novices, particularly in dorsal attention, ventral attention, and frontoparietal networks, indicating greater integration. These neural patterns correlated positively with measures of bodily self illusion and negatively with cognitive defusion, a construct reflecting reduced self-grasping toward thoughts. The findings suggest that nondual awareness involves alterations in self-representation and large-scale functional brain integration.
November 7, 2020
Stefano Poletti, Oussama Abdoun, Jelle Zorn et al.
preprint
People respond to pain based on psychological mechanisms, beliefs, and expectations. Mindfulness meditation helps regulate pain through positive reappraisal and emotional regulation, but how people subjectively experience pain in connection with meditation is not well understood. In a mixed-methods study combining qualitative interviews with an experimental thermal pain task, 32 novices who received short meditation training and 30 experts with over 10,000 lifetime hours of practice described their pain experiences. Five phenomenological clusters emerged: pain as an unpleasant sensation prompting avoidance-suppression, volitional agency-distanciation, or positive cognitive reappraisal and flexibility; and, mainly among experts, pain as an opportunity for metacognitive insights about mental processes and for deconstructing suffering, with the fifth cluster integrating shared human suffering and compassion. Each cluster correlated with distinct self-reports during the pain task.