Mindfulness Journal

A posting on a professional journal reminded me of this: there's a journal called Mindfulness that's been around since March 2010. The journal is dedicated to mindfulness-based research. The reason why I mention it is that you can download all the articles for free. That's right--free!

Most scientific journals require that you pay--either by the article or through a subscription. Colleges and universities usually have subscription packages, as do some public libraries, although the public libraries tend to be more limited.

I don't know how long Mindfulness will be offered for free. My guess is that when it becomes popular enough to charge for, the publisher will start charging. In the meantime, download what you want.

You can check out Mindfulness here.

NYT Article on Marsha Linehan and Dialectical Behavior Therapy

We've written in the past in Scientific Mindfulness about Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), one of the early pioneers in mindfulness-based treatments. DBT is also hugely important in providing effective treatment for extremely suicidal people who how have difficult regulating their emotions--often diagnosed as borderline personality disorder. These are the kind of clients that many therapists in Portland still shy away from.

In this New Yorker Times article, University of Washington professor and core DBT originator Dr. Marsha Linehan talks about her own struggles with suicidality. This is the first time she's publicly come out about being hospitalized for 26 months when she was a teenager. During this time she was placed in seclusion, strapped down, and given electroconvulsive therapy. Dr. Linehan eventually devoted her life to helping people with the types of problems she had struggled with. As she says, 

“I decided to get supersuicidal people, the very worst cases, because I figured these are the most miserable people in the world — they think they’re evil, that they’re bad, bad, bad — and I understood that they weren’t,” she said. “I understood their suffering because I’d been there, in hell, with no idea how to get out.”

It's a stunning, public revelation from a very important researcher, clinician, and figure in psychology. To read the full article, click here.

Mindfulness-Based Attention as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Depressive Affect and Negative Cognitions

Here’s another study in the growing body of research suggesting that mindfulness changes how we experience depression.

Researchers at Pacific University collected self-report measures of mindfulness, depression, and negative thinking from a sample of 278 undergraduates. Analyses suggest that there is a weaker relationship between negative thinking and depressive symptom for people higher in mindfulness than for people lower in mindfulness.

What might this mean?

The authors conclude that being more mindful may serve a protective function against becoming depressed when someone experiences negative thoughts. Conversely, less mindful people may be more likely to become depressed when they have negative thoughts.

The results are pretty limited. For one, this was a convenience sample of undergraduate students, not a sample of people with clinical depression. Also, because the results are correlational, we can’t draw any firm conclusions that one thing causes another. We can't tell from these results whether increasing mindfulness actually serves as a prophylactic against becoming depressed.

However, if you're interested in studies that tell us more about how mindfulness may impact how we experience depression, check out some of the past posts from Scientific Mindfulness on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention. Additionally, a longitudinal study showed that less mindful police officers showed greater increases in depression over time compared to their more mindful counterparts.

For the full citation:

Gilbert, B.D., & Christopher, M.S. (2010). Mindfulness-Based Attention as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Depressive Affect and Negative Cognitions. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 34, 514-521.

You might also be interested in some of these other books about mindfulness and depression: 

I’d like to thank Molly Ellis for her help with this post!

Meditation Experience Predicts Less Negative Appraisal of Pain: Electrophysiological Evidence for the Involvement of Anticipatory Neural Responses

In a recent study, researchers in the United Kingdom examined the impact of meditation experience and the anticipation of and experience of pain. The control group consisted of 15 people with no previous experience in meditation. They were compared with 12 people who came from a variety of Buddhist and non-Buddhist meditative backgrounds. It was a pretty heterogeneous sample of meditators.

The researchers encountered difficulty developing a reliable estimate of meditation experience. They eventually disregarded the amount of hours per week of practice and instead looked at the overall lifetime experience with meditation. These ranged from less than 1 year to more than 30 years experience.

The researchers used a laser to induce a painful burning sensation in the participants. Anticipation of pain was created through a visual stimulus that indicated to the participants that they would be exposed to the laser within 3 seconds.  Because of the design, the researchers suggest they may have over-estimated the impact of the anticipation of pain on the actual pain response. In addition to self-report by the participants, the researchers used an EEG (e.g., brain scan) to measure participants' anticipation to and experience of pain.

Initially, the researchers found no significant difference in perceived pain between the mediation and control groups. Once the researchers dropped participants with less than 6 years of meditation experience from the analyses, however, participants with more meditation experience showed a lower response to anticipated pain unpleasantness.  This relationship was accounted for by the age of the meditators.  However, there was no correlation in the control group between pain response and age.  Although the relationship is not entirely clear, it appears that meditation experience may impact anticipation of pain.

In looking at the EEG results, an interesting pattern emerges. The researchers suggest that those with meditation experience were more likely to process and contextutalize the experience of pain before responding to it emotionally.

In summary, the researchers suggest that the cultivation of acceptance through practicing attentional control (i.e., through regular meditation practice) may allow people to show more equanimity in both in their anticipation of pain and their actual experience of it.

There are some limitations with the pain assessment in this study. As noted, researchers admitted that they had a difficult time determining if the pain assessment was in fact influenced by the anticipation of the pain. Also, because of the design of the study, we can't completely rule out that people who take up meditation are inherently different from those who don't meditate, and that these differences--rather than the actual meditation practice--better explain the results.

To download a  copy of the article, click on the full citation is below:

Brown, C.A., & Jones, A.K.P. (2010). Mediation Experience Predicts Less Negative Appraisal of Pain: Electrophysiological Evidence for the Involvement of Anticipatory Neural Responses. Pain, 150, 428-438.

I’d like to thank Molly Ellis for her help with drafting this post!