I posted twice in April on research incorporating the use of mindfulness skills in the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): a study using Metacognitive Therapy and a pilot study using mindfulness meditation. Psych Central posted an article by Lynda McCollough yesterday on this growing body of research. The article focuses on some of the work being done through the Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) at UCLA. They've developed a program called Mindful Awareness Practices for ADHD (MAP), and the article has comments by Lidia Zylowska, MD, a psychiatrist who founded MARC. It provides a nice overview of some of their work and has some useful links and citations.
You can read the Psych Central article here.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Thursday, September 2, 2010
A Mindfulness Revolution in Education
Susan Kaiser Greenland, author of The Mindful Child, had an article published last month in The Huffington Post about the application of mindfulness for children and adolescents.
You can check it out here.
You can check it out here.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Integrative Body-Mind Training
A psychologist at the University of Oregon Michael Posner has teamed up with a group of Chinese researchers lead by Dr. Yi-Yuan Tang at Dalian University of Technology. They are studying a form of meditation called Integrative Body-Mind Training (IBMT) developed and adapted by Dr. Tang from traditional Chinese medicine.
IBMT involves mindfulness training, relaxation of muscle groups, and guided imagery, and it is accompanied by music played in the background. It's unclear to me how IBMT differs from mindfulness meditation--with the exception of the addition of background music--but there appears to be significant overlap in these types of meditation.
In a recent study using neuroimaging, changes in brain activity were observed in participants practicing IBMT after 11 hours of training compared to a control group who received only relaxation training. (More than 6 hours appear to be required for changes to be measurable.) Changes were most pronounced in the anterior cingulate, a part of the brain associated with the ability to regulate emotions and behavior.
According to a Science Daily article, IBMT is not available outside of China, so I don't know much about it. As I noted, I'm unclear whether there are any fundamental differences between IBMT and mindfulness meditation. This is a danger of some of the neuroimaging research: so many different types of meditation have been examined using different kinds of equipment that it can be difficult to make sense of the results other than that meditation appears to affect the brain. (Click here for a previous post about a review of the literature, and here for a previous post about some of the problems of the neuroimaging literature.) That said, any attempts at controlled studies of meditation are exciting, and what is unique about this one is that the researchers observed changes after only 11 hours of training! A number of studies draw from either experienced Buddhist meditators or people who have completed an 8-week mindfulness meditation program (e.g., MBSR), so this is a pretty cool finding.
To download and read a PDF of the published scientific article, click here.
To read a Science Daily article about the study, click here.
For the full citation:
IBMT involves mindfulness training, relaxation of muscle groups, and guided imagery, and it is accompanied by music played in the background. It's unclear to me how IBMT differs from mindfulness meditation--with the exception of the addition of background music--but there appears to be significant overlap in these types of meditation.
In a recent study using neuroimaging, changes in brain activity were observed in participants practicing IBMT after 11 hours of training compared to a control group who received only relaxation training. (More than 6 hours appear to be required for changes to be measurable.) Changes were most pronounced in the anterior cingulate, a part of the brain associated with the ability to regulate emotions and behavior.
According to a Science Daily article, IBMT is not available outside of China, so I don't know much about it. As I noted, I'm unclear whether there are any fundamental differences between IBMT and mindfulness meditation. This is a danger of some of the neuroimaging research: so many different types of meditation have been examined using different kinds of equipment that it can be difficult to make sense of the results other than that meditation appears to affect the brain. (Click here for a previous post about a review of the literature, and here for a previous post about some of the problems of the neuroimaging literature.) That said, any attempts at controlled studies of meditation are exciting, and what is unique about this one is that the researchers observed changes after only 11 hours of training! A number of studies draw from either experienced Buddhist meditators or people who have completed an 8-week mindfulness meditation program (e.g., MBSR), so this is a pretty cool finding.
To download and read a PDF of the published scientific article, click here.
To read a Science Daily article about the study, click here.
For the full citation:
Tang, Y. Y., Lu, Q., Geng, X., Stein, E. A., Yang, Y., & Posner, M. I. (2010). Short-term meditation induces white matter changes in the anterior cingulate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Thought Suppression and Smoking
In mindfulness, we attempt to cultivate awareness of our thoughts without trying to alter or push them away. There's a growing research literature on the dangers of thought suppression--not only does it not work but it may actual increase the incidence of the behavior one is trying to suppression.
The LA Times published an article last week on a study involving a group of smokers. They were split into three group: one group was told to simply record use; one was told to think more about smoking; and one group was asked to actively suppress thoughts about smoking. Although smokers asked to suppress thoughts smoked less the first week, their stress and discomfort increased the the second week, and by the third week, they were smoking more. As noted in the article, this has implications for any sort of habit change.
Click here to read the full newspaper article.
The LA Times published an article last week on a study involving a group of smokers. They were split into three group: one group was told to simply record use; one was told to think more about smoking; and one group was asked to actively suppress thoughts about smoking. Although smokers asked to suppress thoughts smoked less the first week, their stress and discomfort increased the the second week, and by the third week, they were smoking more. As noted in the article, this has implications for any sort of habit change.
Click here to read the full newspaper article.
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