Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
February 9, 2018
Tommi Himberg, Julien Laroche, Romain Bigé et al.
84 citations
Collective dance improvisation, such as traditional social dancing or contact improvisation, is a participatory, relational, and embodied art form that challenges standard aesthetic concepts. Researchers are investigating the mechanisms behind the lived experience of "togetherness" in these practices, which is kinaesthetic and can be measured from both performer and spectator perspectives. The work uses multiple levels of description: first-person phenomenological experiences, third-person brain and body activity, and interpersonal dynamics. Two protocols are described: a four-person mirror game and a "rhythm battle" dance improvisation score.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
November 18, 2024
Alessandro Lazzarelli, Francesca Scafuto, Cristiano Crescentini et al.
30 citations
Interoceptive ability—detecting and interpreting body signals—can be trained through mind-body interventions and is central to emotion regulation. Mindfulness meditation improves both interoceptive ability and emotion regulation via top-down brain-body processing. Interventions using bottom-up processing through body movement and emotional expression remain under-investigated. The authors argue that interoceptive ability is a crucial aspect linking mind-body interventions to emotion regulation and suggest that studying it with both quantitative and qualitative methods could integrate top-down and bottom-up emotion processing, observational and non-observational body awareness, and conscious and unconscious levels of interoception.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
January 11, 2023
Carol Barton, Rona Hart
24 citations
Self-transcendent social activists—people who dedicate their lives to serving the greater good without seeking personal recognition—experience their lives as joyful, deeply fulfilled, and impactful. Through in-depth interviews with eight such activists, a theoretical model emerged explaining how their activism develops: a trigger activates their commitment, which is then maintained and sustained, resulting in impacts at individual, community, and global levels. Their actions generate positive contagion through influence, replication, leadership training, and education. The study defines 'self-transcendent social activism' and offers a model of how a deep feeling of connectedness and a vision for a better life lead to sustained, transformative community action.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
January 8, 2025
Rossella Mattea Quinto, Francesca Russo, Francesca Scafuto et al.
10 citations
A body-based mindfulness program reduced distress symptoms (anxiety, depression, and somatic symptoms) and alexithymia, and improved dispositional mindfulness (observing, acting with awareness, and non-reacting) among healthy adults. Seventy-three participants (mean age 40.1) were assigned to either the program or a waiting-list control group. Measures taken at baseline and one-week post-test showed improvements even when controlling for baseline scores. The program may help integrate bodily expressions, thoughts, and emotions.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
December 6, 2019
Richard Parncutt
8 citations
A speculative theory proposes that uniquely human behaviors such as language, religion, and music emerged around 100,000 years ago, rooted in the mother-infant relationship. The mother schema, a multimodal representation of the carer from the fetal/infant perspective, organizes prenatal stimuli like voice and heartbeat, fostering fearless trust. Bipedalism and encephalization led to earlier births and more fragile infants, driving cognitive advances in communication and manipulation of carers. Later, mother schema emotions were triggered in ritual settings by repetitive sounds, subdued light, and other sensory cues, explaining cross-cultural commonalities in altered states and spiritual beings. Reflective consciousness arose as infant-mother dyads explored intentionality and carers predicted accidents. Evidence is circumstantial; falsification is problematic.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
July 4, 2025
Chao Liu, Li-Jen Lin, Kang-Jie Zhang et al.
7 citations
A randomized controlled trial of 92 Chinese police officers found that a 6-week program of daily 10-minute loving-kindness meditation guided by a short video app improved public service motivation, conflict resolution skills, and communication skills, but did not significantly enhance mindfulness. The intervention used a waitlist control group and validated scales. The results suggest that brief, digitally delivered compassion-focused meditation can be integrated into police training to strengthen prosocial motivation, de-escalation abilities, and public communication, potentially improving police-community interactions.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
August 16, 2024
Judith Rohde, Elena Hickmann, Marco Buchmann et al.
7 citations
A pilot case series tested an eight-week program combining nasally administered ketamine (0.5 mg/kg) with trauma-focused psychotherapy for three individuals with chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD. Clinically relevant reductions in PTSD symptoms were observed, with CAPS-5 scores decreasing by an average of 18 points after treatment and 25 points at follow-up. Depressive symptoms also improved, with HAMD scores dropping by an average of 8.3 points after treatment and 9 points at follow-up. Additional benefits included reduced anxiety, fewer dissociations, and better emotion regulation. The ketamine was well tolerated and provided immediate relief from tension, anxiety, and common PTSD symptoms. The authors note that randomized controlled trials are needed to validate these findings.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
August 31, 2021
Sherry-Anne Muscat, Geralyn Dorothy Wright, Kristy Bergeron et al.
5 citations
Pairing ketamine therapy with culturally attuned trauma-informed psychotherapy in a collaborative cross-cultural partnership may improve treatment effectiveness and quality of life for Indigenous people. Decolonizing Indigenous health requires equal partnership between government and communities, built on a holistic foundation of mind, body, social, and spiritual balance within the context of colonialism. Ketamine, a fast-acting antidepressant taking effect within 4 hours even in acute suicidality, engages multiple systems damaged by intergenerational complex developmental trauma. Its brief alteration of waking consciousness is familiar in many Indigenous healing cultures, making it a potential core treatment modality around which culturally engaged approaches can be organized.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
May 21, 2025
Remy Haswell-Martin, Finn Upham, Simon Høffding et al.
3 citations
Live music can create transformative, personal aesthetic experiences for listeners, yet concert research often emphasizes shared responses. This paper examines exploratory listening through embodied-enactive engagement and affective resonance, analyzing data from two musically skilled audience members who heard Harald Sæverud's 'Kjempeviseslåtten' (1943) performed by the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and The Norwegian Radio Orchestra in 2024. Combining phenomenological interviews with measurements of breathing and body motion, the authors find forms of absorbed, imaginative, and embodied involvement that both corroborate crowd patterns and reveal individual exploratory expertise and idiosyncratic affective orientations, challenging a sole focus on synchronized response.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
March 5, 2025
Jongtae Kim, Seonyeop Kim, Misan W D Kim et al.
3 citations
A 12-week Mindfulness-based Social-Emotional Growth (MSEG) program improved emotional regulation among elementary school students in South Korea. Lower-grade students (grades 1-3) showed substantially reduced anxiety and depression, while upper-grade students (grades 4-6) demonstrated enhanced resilience compared to a control group. The quasi-experimental study involved 70 students in the intervention group and 72 in the control group at one school in Gyeonggi-do. Results suggest the program has potential for promoting early mental health when integrated into school curricula.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
March 4, 2024
Quan Tang, Jing Han, Xianglong Zeng
3 citations
Adding background music to loving-kindness meditation can increase low-arousal and pro-social positive emotions without making the practice harder. In a five-day intervention, 200 participants were randomly assigned to six groups that experienced meditation with music containing only harmony, music with both harmony and melody, or no music on different days. Music boosted low-arousal and pro-social positive emotions compared to silence, but there was no difference between the two types of music. Music did not affect difficulties such as lack of concentration or lack of pro-social attitudes. Practice over days influenced medium-arousal positive emotions and concentration difficulty, though results varied across groups.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
April 18, 2025
Laura García-pérez, Rosario Padial-Ruz, Mar Cepero-González et al.
2 citations
A 12-week program combining physical activity and meditation improved resilience, reduced depression, and increased sleep duration among Spanish university students. Men experienced greater mood benefits. The quasi-experimental study with 136 students (82 in the intervention group, 54 in the control group) found no major changes in self-esteem, psychological distress, personality traits, or physical activity levels. The results suggest that such interventions can enhance key aspects of mental health, though further research is needed to examine long-term effects and differentiate preventive from therapeutic approaches.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
March 1, 2024
Massimo Marraffa, Cristina Meini
2 citations
Human life depends on building and defending a subjective identity, which is foundational for psychological well-being and mental health, as important as biological needs or social competition. Drawing on contemporary cognitive sciences rather than neo-Cartesian philosophy, the authors examine how cognitive, emotional, and affective elements intertwine to construct subjective identity, focusing on the role of Theory-of-Mind abilities. They suggest that at every stage of self-construction, individuals engage in largely innate processes of understanding others, and that mature self-awareness is secondary to knowledge of others, serving primarily as an evolutionarily refined defense mechanism.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
October 5, 2022
Jorge Emanuel Martins, Joana Simões, Marlene Barros et al.
2 citations
Neurotypical young adults can be sorted into four distinct subgroups based on how they reflect on themselves: self-awareness, self-consciousness, reflective self, and pre-reflective self. A convenience sample of 128 healthy university students aged 19–25 underwent a psychological assessment and a single cognitive behavioral intervention combining psychophysical training with autobiographical memory recall. The results isolated these four forms of self-directed attention, each with discrete cognitive characteristics, providing a basis for mental health profiling. The authors plan future work to test the reliability of these mental strata through molecular and neurophysiological analysis.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
March 6, 2026
Elena Koning, Susan Gamberg, Aaron Keshen
1 citation
Eating disorders remain difficult to treat, with high dropout and low remission rates in cognitive-behavioral therapy for eating disorders (CBT-ED). Psilocybin treatment may enhance CBT-ED by producing antidepressant, neuroplasticity, and emotional openness effects that could increase therapeutic engagement and improve outcomes. This narrative review consolidates theoretical evidence for combining psilocybin treatment with CBT-ED, proposes considerations for a concurrent intervention protocol, and outlines clinical and research considerations for testing its feasibility, safety, and efficacy. The authors expect this work to advance treatments for eating disorders and the study of psychedelics as tools to enhance evidence-based psychotherapy.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
March 26, 2025
Sihui Zheng, Bin Zhang, Haichun Zhou et al.
1 citation
Mindfulness and executive function (EF) are related in upper-elementary students in rural China. Fourth graders had lower mindfulness scores than fifth graders. Mindfulness training improved mindfulness and working memory in fourth graders with average mindfulness levels, but improvements in inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility were not statistically significant. Children with higher mindfulness also performed better on EF measures.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
May 14, 2026
Fabiola Raffone, Carlo Ignazio Cattaneo, Enrico Pessina et al.
Trauma-related autobiographical memories can become intrusive and distressing, contributing to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, including treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Intranasal esketamine, an approved rapid-acting treatment for TRD, may create conditions that facilitate psychotherapeutic work on traumatic memories. This narrative review synthesizes evidence on ketamine and esketamine for PTSD and trauma symptoms, distinguishing intravenous ketamine studies, intranasal esketamine data, and combination approaches with psychotherapy.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
April 30, 2026
Dylan Briggs, Thomas B Sease, Ruthie Menou et al.
Mystical experiences—marked by a sense of interconnectedness and transcendence—are linked to lasting positive changes in thoughts, emotions, and behavior. In a sample of 150 adults recruited online, researchers used a machine-learning technique (elastic net regression) to examine how four facets of psychological flexibility (experiential acceptance, present-moment awareness, cognitive defusion, and self-as-context) relate to self-reported mystical experiences, while also accounting for state of surrender, frequency of psychedelic use, and near-death experiences. State of Surrender, experiential acceptance, cognitive defusion, and present-moment awareness were the strongest predictors. The findings suggest that surrender-related processes and psychological flexibility play a key role in predicting mystical experiences.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
March 11, 2026
Zixi Liu, Zhen Wu, Jingchao Zeng et al.
A 21-day program combining daily nasal breathing regulation, spontaneous mandala drawing, and descriptive journaling, with weekly group sharing, heightened interoceptive awareness and mind-body integration among 11 urban adults in mainland China. Three interrelated processes emerged: refinement of bodily attention, a shift from deliberate control to natural immersion, and symbolization of feeling through artistic expression and social resonance. A non-goal-directed, relaxed practice style helped transition from control to absorption, activating self-regulatory mechanisms. Non-evaluative awareness deepened flow and supported cognitive reorganization. The study outlines a pathway by which breath-triggered interoceptive work operates within mind-body interventions.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
January 13, 2026
Victor Julián Padilla, Vanessa Muñiz, Katherine Scheffrahn et al.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of five randomized controlled trials found that mindful hypnotherapy—an intervention combining hypnotic induction with mindfulness suggestions—produced large reductions in psychological distress (effect size 0.61) and stress (0.75), and a large increase in mindfulness (1.38) compared to waitlist and active control groups. The authors recommend future research on a wider range of clinical problems, use of active controls, measures of hypnotizability, and studies with diverse populations.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
September 5, 2025
Kin Cheung George Lee, Hin Hung Sik, Hang Kin Leung et al.
Long-term Can-Hua-Tou (Chan/Zen) meditation practice is associated with distinct high-frequency brain activity patterns. Experienced monks showed elevated beta and gamma brainwave activity across all conditions compared to novice practitioners, with the most pronounced difference in gamma band activity over fronto-parietal regions. Unlike relaxation-based meditation styles that increase alpha and theta waves, Chan meditation produces a profile dominated by beta-gamma dynamics, consistent with the Buddhist concept of one-pointed concentration and vigilance during self-inquiry. Novice practitioners showed negligible beta or gamma modulation. These findings indicate that different contemplative strategies produce distinct neurophysiological changes, with intensive cognitive meditation linked to enduring high-frequency cortical synchrony.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
April 3, 2025
Ophir Katzenelenbogen, Daniela Aisenberg-Shafran
A short mindfulness-based intervention emphasizing decentering and a guided-imagery intervention both improved cognitive and emotional outcomes in community-dwelling seniors. Thirty older adults (average age 74.7) were assigned to either an 8-week decentering intervention, a guided-imagery intervention, or a care-as-usual control group. Both interventions involved weekly 20-minute sessions and daily 10-minute home practice. After the interventions, only the intervention groups showed reduced response time and improved accuracy on the Simon task, decreased depression levels, and increased positive relationships. The findings suggest these brief, easy-to-deliver protocols can enhance psychological and cognitive status in older adults.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
March 18, 2025
Rylan Fowers, Aurel Coza, Yunro Chung et al.
Temporal consistency in the time of day of meditation sessions is associated with long-term meditation app use for fewer than half of users. Among 4205 annual subscribers to a commercial meditation app, 39.5% showed consistent timing, 55.3% inconsistent timing, and 5.23% were indeterminate. Panel models confirmed that temporal consistency had contrasting relationships with meditation maintenance across these three groups. This suggests that other behavioral mechanisms besides temporally consistent habits can support sustained meditation app use, with implications for promoting maintenance of complex health behaviors like physical activity and diet.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
February 24, 2025
Xu Li, Yong Yang, Ranran Wang et al.
A brief breath-counting mindfulness exercise can improve how people learn to distinguish dangerous from safe cues during fear conditioning. In a discriminative fear conditioning experiment, participants who practiced breath counting gave lower shock-expectancy ratings to a safety signal (CS−) than those who read freely, indicating less overgeneralization of fear to safe stimuli. The mindfulness group also showed reduced skin conductance responses overall, yet the groups did not differ in their overall fear acquisition effect. The findings suggest that breath-counting tasks enhance sensitivity to conditioned fear acquisition by reducing exaggerated fear responses to safety signals, offering insights for preventing anxiety disorders.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)
January 24, 2025
Taranah Gazder, Erica Ruby Drummond, Mine Gelegen et al.
A systematic map of experimental studies found that multi-session meditation interventions, particularly mindfulness and loving-kindness, may help people with higher attachment anxiety and, to a lesser extent, attachment avoidance experience better personal and relational outcomes. The review identified only five studies from Western cultures, four examining how meditation buffers the effects of attachment insecurity and one testing whether it enhances attachment security. Evidence primarily showed benefits for those with higher attachment anxiety, with some indications for those with higher avoidance. The authors conclude that early results are promising but that much more research is needed.