Mindfulness
June 21, 2023
Masoumeh Rahmani, Valerie van Mulukom, Miguel Farias
14 citations
People's beliefs about what mindfulness can do—such as improving relationships, fostering peace, or transforming inner experience—shape how they respond to mindfulness interventions. A new scale, the Belief in the Powers of Mindfulness Scale (BPMS), was developed from participants' key beliefs, which fell into three themes: interpersonal relationships and compassion, peace and violence, and the inner world. These beliefs were tied to broader cultural ideas like expressive individualism and New Age philosophy. The BPMS showed strong internal consistency and validity. Older and more spiritual individuals practiced mindfulness more often and longer, reported greater mindfulness skills, and scored higher on the BPMS. The findings underscore the need to account for people's beliefs and cultural context in mindfulness research and practice.
October 7, 2021
Valerie van Mulukom, Armin W. Geertz, Robert W. Clark et al.
2 citations
preprint
Art and religion function as symbolic systems that transform subjective knowledge into concrete, memorable, and shareable forms through symbols and material artifacts. Drawing on past sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and current cognitive research, the authors argue that both phenomena serve as repositories of meaning, encapsulating emotions, experiences, and beliefs. The self-transcendent nature of art and religious experiences enhances symbol significance, conveying rich meanings beyond descriptive language. Aligned with aesthetic cognitivism, art offers unique cognitive contributions beyond decoration. The strength of art and religion lies in their existence within imagination, underscoring the centrality of meaning-making in shaping societies by preserving and disseminating subjective knowledge beyond language's confines.
January 9, 2026
Valerie van Mulukom
preprint
Consciousness is best understood as dynamic configurations of two distinct self states—a reflective self and an experiential self—rather than as static layers. The reflective self involves narrative, self-referential thought supported by the default mode network, while the experiential self is an embodied, affective-salience mode of awareness anchored in salience network hubs such as the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, integrating bodily and external signals into a coherent sense of being a subject. Within predictive processing, the experiential self is a mode where precision-weighted affective and bodily prediction errors shape ongoing meta-aware experience. Altered states, including those in meditation, reveal how shifting to and maintaining the experiential self can be practiced. The framework offers testable predictions for neurocomputational models and longitudinal studies.
March 10, 2020
Valerie van Mulukom, Ruairi Patterson, Michiel van Elk
preprint
Awe experienced during classical serotonergic psychedelic (CSP) use is linked to lower maladaptive narcissism. In a survey of 414 people, those who reported greater awe during recent CSP experiences also reported stronger feelings of social connectedness and affective empathy, which in turn were associated with less exploitative and entitled narcissistic traits. This pattern held even after accounting for sensation-seeking. Ego dissolution during the experience showed no similar effect. The findings suggest that awe-induced connectedness, not ego loss, may underlie the therapeutic potential of psychedelics for conditions involving impaired empathy and connection, such as pathological narcissism.