All Research

Funding: Bial Foundation Meditation practices evoke strong and significant changes in the experienced relationship to mental life. Phenomenological analyses of psychological states associated with long term practice have yielded insight into the notion that a combination of cognitive changes are evoked through such practices which can be usefully categorized as increased meta-awareness (monitoring of experience), increased dereification (degree to which thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are phenomenally interpreted as mental processes rather than as accurate depictions of reality), and decreased object-orientation (experience oriented toward some object or class of objects). Both increased dereification and decreased object orientation are of key importance to the experience of “thoughtless” or “narrative free” awareness as experienced in meditation. In open awareness meditation practices one develops the capacity to relate the thinking process in a more clear and non-reactive mode, distancing one’s self from identification with thought contents, similarly one adopts a less object-focused awareness, allowing...
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Funding: USC Department of Psychiatry, Della Martin Foundation Meditation practices can evoke strong and significant changes in the experienced relationship to mental life. In this study we are seeking to understand the impact of mindfulness meditation on brain measures of attention and awareness in combination with the impact on measures of psychological well-being to assess the relationships therein. Participants will have brain measures recorded using EEG while engaging with specific auditory and visual cues to probe sensory and cognitive processing both before and after their engagement with an 8-week introductory course in mindfulness meditation.  We are also recruit long term meditator participants as a comparison group. The study is constructed so as to generate insight into the neural changes underlying the practice of mindfulness meditation and their relationship to changes in stress, rumination, and depression as well as the experience of self and self-narrative processes. To inquire about or enroll...
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Funding: NIH/NCRR Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute; Grant No. UL1RR024131 Overview. We propose to conduct an open trial to evaluate an innovative and theoretically well-grounded stress-management curriculum. Our aim is to help underserved, low-income, minority children cultivate more adaptive stress-management skills and increase social-emotional competencies. Collecting preliminary effectiveness data will increase the likelihood of success in a future, appropriately powered, randomized trial. This collaboration between USC, the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD), and the ABC-Unified School District (ABC-USD) creates a multidisciplinary team with expertise in mindfulness-based therapies, childhood anxiety, translation of clinical services to community settings, and principles of effective teaching. Scope of the problem. Stress and anxiety are the most common mental health problems in youth, and they are also the most costly. Symptoms frequently begin in childhood, tend to be persistent, and often lead to subsequent medical, emotional, or behavioral disorders. Early remediation can reduce future difficulties, such...
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Funding: Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute; Grant No. 1UL1TR001855 Mindfulness-based programs for children and adolescents are in widespread use in clinics, schools, and communities. However, current research support for the efficacy of these interventions is limited. One significant challenge to the field of youth mindfulness research is the scarcity of reliable and valid measures of mindfulness that are both meaningful and appropriate for this population. Development of child and adolescent measures is vital, both for understanding the nature, degree, and role of mindfulness skills among youth and for ascertaining potential mechanisms of change in mindfulness-based interventions. Development of a measure that may be sensitive to treatment effects and mindfulness experience would also support more robust efficacy trials of mindfulness-based interventions. We propose to collect data using online survey methodology to validate a recently developed questionnaire measure of mindfulness for youth ages 8 to 18—the Mindfulness Inventory for Children and...
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Funding: Mind and Life Institute; Varela Award Despite decades of school reform, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disproportionality in student academic opportunity and discipline continues to be a significant concern throughout the education system. Mindfulness training may help K-5 teachers engage in behaviors that foster an academic and emotional climate which promotes equitable learning opportunities for all students. The proposed study is a longitudinal, nonrandomized controlled trial of a mindfulness-based professional development program with 150 elementary school teachers/staff. The intent is to cultivate personal mindfulness practices and integrate mindfulness practices into their classrooms. We hypothesize that this intervention will allow teachers/staff to internalize mindfulness concepts and integrate mindfulness practices into their classrooms. Consequently, we expect participants to act and speak in ways that create a positive classroom climate and encourages equitable learning opportunities for all students. Feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness data will be examined. Mindfulness, compassion, perceived stress, classroom climate, and...
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Funding: NIAAA R34AA027845 (9/15/20 to 8/31/23) In this study, researchers will modify an established brief mobile-based mindfulness intervention developed for veterans with PTSD (Mindfulness Coach) to include Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention content; evaluate feasibility, usability, and acceptability of the developed intervention; and conduct a pilot randomized controlled trial with veterans outside of the VA to provide support for a larger project to test the revamped app on a larger scale. The long-term goal of this proposal is to improve treatment outcomes for OEF/OIF veterans with alcohol use disorder (AUD) and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) who are not currently accessing care through the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System (VA) or other settings. Many OEF/OIF veterans struggle with heavy drinking and related consequences and this can be especially pronounced with the co-occurrence of PTSD. Prior research has found aspects of self-regulation (emotion regulation, impulse control), stress, and craving to be important putative targets in AUD and PTSD symptom...
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Recent research in functional genomics shows that social stressors affect the expression of immune response genes. These effects are mediated in part via our adaptive capacity for intracellular molecules to respond to extracellular signals, a process called signal transduction. Under this framework, one-way stressors can be transduced into cellular changes is through central nervous system (CNS) modulation of peripheral neural, endocrine, and molecular activity. Mindfulness meditation is a consciousness discipline used to cultivate attention and self-regulation, and may thus be relevant to the signal transduction process outlined in the social genomics literature. In this opinion article, we briefly review results from existing controlled trials that test the effects of mindfulness meditation on gene expression. We then speculate on a mind-body conceptual model, grounded in existing social genomics theory. In the spirit of hypothesis generation, we argue that mindfulness meditation changes brain activity patterns related to attention, self-regulation, and threat evaluation and...
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Funding: Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program This is a experimental double-blind, placebo-controlled laboratory study, wherein we propose to test the combined effects of MT and intranasal oxytocin (inOT) in N=180 adult smokers during overnight smoking abstinence and administration of a Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), an acute stressor task that incites anxiety in a social context. The goal of this research is to determine if combining pharmacological and behavioral treatments has implications for smoking cessation. Objectives of this study include (1) to test the effects of MT combined with inOT on the ability to resist smoking on the smoking lapse task following exposure to an acute social evaluative stressor (2) to test the effects of MT combined with inOT on smoking urge, nicotine withdrawal, anxiety and cortisol levels following exposure to an acute social evaluative stressor, and (3) to test potential psychophysiological mechanisms of action linking MT and smoking behavior. The...
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