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.
Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging
April 1, 2025
Antoine Lutz, Oussama Abdoun, Yair Dor-Ziderman et al.
18 citations
The neurophenomenology research program, pioneered by Varela, rigorously examines subjective experience using first-person methodologies inspired by phenomenology and contemplative practices. This review explores recent advancements, particularly their application to meditation practices and potential clinical translations. It examines innovative multidimensional phenomenological assessment tools designed to capture subtle, dynamic shifts in experiential content and structures of consciousness during meditation, shedding light on mechanisms and trajectories of meditation practice.
Biological psychiatry global open science
July 1, 2025
Oussama Abdoun, Arnaud Poublan-Couzardot, Stéphane Offort et al.
5 citations
Most meditation research uses trait questionnaires that miss moment-to-moment changes during practice. The Lyon Assessment of Meditation Phenomenology (LAMP) questionnaire was developed to capture contextual, emotional, bodily, attentional, cognitive, and metacognitive dimensions of meditation. Fifty-three experienced meditators completed the LAMP after each session during a 10-day retreat. Over 60% of the assessed dimensions changed significantly over time, with distinct trajectories depending on meditation type (focused attention vs. open monitoring) and individual expertise. Three clusters of individual trajectories emerged, linked to prior experience and difficulties during the retreat. Findings on pain regulation were replicated and extended. This approach offers a rich, dynamic characterization of meditative experience.
Journal of Experimental Psychology General
February 22, 2024
Enrico Fucci, Oussama Abdoun, Constanza Baquedano et al.
5 citations
Compassion in Western psychology is described as being conditioned by cost-benefit appraisals, such as attributing responsibility for suffering, whereas Buddhist traditions maintain that compassion can become unconditioned and universal. This study tested whether expert Buddhist practitioners show compassion that is less influenced by moral judgments about the causes of suffering. Using self-report and behavioral data from both expert practitioners and trained novices, the researchers found that contextual information affected responsibility and blame attribution in both groups. However, experts reported higher willingness to help that was less influenced by context compared to novices.
PsyArXiv
June 11, 2024
Antoine Lutz, Oussama Abdoun, Yair Dor-Ziderman et al.
4 citations
preprint
A review of recent advances in neurophenomenology, a research program that rigorously examines subjective experience using first-person methods inspired by phenomenology and contemplative practices. The review covers three areas: new multidimensional tools for capturing dynamic changes in consciousness during meditation; empirical studies using experienced meditators to deconstruct aversive and self-related processes, revealing markers for pain regulation, self-dissolution, and acceptance of mortality; and a deep computational neurophenomenology framework that uses deep parametric active inference to naturalize phenomenology. These innovations suggest that mutual constraints among phenomenological, computational, and neurophysiological domains can contribute to an integrated understanding of mental illness and its treatment.
Scientific Reports
May 2, 2024
Sucharit Katyal, Oussama Abdoun, Hugues Mounier et al.
4 citations
Long-term meditators in an open monitoring (OM) state show reduced automatic mental processing of objects that imply actions, compared to their baseline state. Novice meditators did not show this reduction. The study used EEG to measure µ-rhythm desynchronization, which correlated with how long objects were perceived. The findings suggest OM meditation can help decouple automatic cognitive processing of action-related mental content.
December 9, 2022
Enrico Fucci, Oussama Abdoun, Constanza Baquedano et al.
3 citations
preprint
Compassion in Western psychology is thought to depend on cost-benefit appraisals, such as whether a person is blamed for their suffering. Buddhist traditions claim compassion can become unconditioned, free from moral judgment. This study tested expert Buddhist practitioners and trained novices using an experiment that manipulated contextual information to influence moral judgments about suffering scenarios. Context manipulation affected responsibility and blame attribution in both groups, but experts reported a higher willingness to help that was less influenced by context. Blame was negatively linked to willingness to help in novices but not in experts. The findings challenge the view that compassion is always conditioned by moral appraisals.
April 13, 2021
Marco Schlosser, Thorsten Barnhofer, Florence Requier et al.
2 citations
A theory-based classification of meditation practices—attentional, constructive, and deconstructive—can guide the creation of composite scores from existing psychological questionnaires. In three samples (meditation-naïve older adults, meditation-naïve older adults with subjective cognitive decline, and long-term meditators with at least 10,000 hours of practice), these composite scores showed adequate psychometric properties, including low floor and ceiling effects, interpretability, and convergent validity with well-being, anxiety, and depression measures. Confirmatory factor analyses supported the predicted three-factor structure. The findings suggest that theoretical models of meditation mechanisms can yield empirically meaningful composite scores for research.
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.
Neuroscience of Consciousness
November 7, 2025
Arnaud Poublan-Couzardot, Alexandre Foncelle, Éric Koun et al.
Active inference theory holds that motor actions rely on suppressing prediction errors from the body to match expected movements. This study investigated whether experienced meditators show altered somatosensory attenuation during a force-matching task. At baseline, a general somatosensory attenuation effect was present and correlated negatively with trait mindfulness, as predicted. However, intensive meditation practice did not produce a global reduction in attenuation. Instead, control participants showed a regression-to-the-mean effect that increased with task repetition, while active participants maintained their baseline level, suggesting the retreat may have affected the formation of prior expectations about force intensity. The authors discuss multiple, possibly opposite effects of meditation on proprioceptive inference.
September 15, 2021
Enrico Fucci, Arnaud Poublan-Couzardot, Oussama Abdoun et al.
preprint
Auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) is a brain response linked to attention and perception, and recent theories suggest mindfulness meditation may alter it. This study attempted to replicate earlier findings that meditation states and expertise modulate MMN amplitude, using a larger sample for greater statistical power. Traditional analysis found no effects of meditation states or expertise on MMN amplitude, failing to replicate prior work. Bayesian analysis provided strong evidence against an interaction between expertise and meditation states, and only moderate evidence for a weak expertise effect during focused attention. However, increased alpha brainwave power during meditation was replicated. The null findings are discussed in light of low statistical power, flexible analysis methods, and possible publication bias in previous research.
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.
Oussama Abdoun, Arnaud Poublan-Couzardot, Stéphane Offort et al.
preprint
A new questionnaire, the Lyon Assessment of Meditation Phenomenology (LAMP), captures how meditation experiences change over time across seven domains: context, intention, emotion, body, attention, thought, and self-awareness. Fifty-three experienced meditators completed the LAMP after each session during a 10-day retreat. Over 60% of the measured dimensions changed significantly, with distinct patterns for focused attention versus open monitoring meditation and for meditators of different expertise levels. Three clusters of individual trajectories emerged, linked to prior experience and difficulties during the retreat. The approach also replicated and extended prior findings on pain regulation. The findings suggest that meditation experience is dynamic and multidimensional, and the LAMP may help deepen understanding of meditation's mechanisms.