Meditation and its underlying ideas are increasingly popular in Western society but the practice itself has been subjected to little high quality scientific scrutiny. In this thesis I describe the outcomes of a research programme aimed at addressing this deficiency. A comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis of the entire English-speaking database of randomised controlled trials clearly demonstrates that the extant data is characterised by a number of methodological and conceptual flaws. As a result there is currently no consistent evidence of a specific effect associated with meditation. The most fundamentally important of these flaws, I propose, is the lack of a consistent and meaningful definition of meditation. Exploring the original descriptions of the meditative experience reveals that a key feature of meditation is the experience of mental silence. Despite this, Western definitions characterise meditation as a method of relaxation, focusing of attention or cognitive modification. The poor performance of meditation in scientific studies may be explained by the fact that definitions of meditation used by Western scientists do not appear to reflect the understanding of meditation as described in the Eastern traditions from which it originated. To explore the salience of the mental silence concept I first conducted a survey of 348 meditators who used a single homogenous form of meditation called Sahaja Yoga which focuses on the experience of mental silence as its defining feature, to assess their functional health and its relationship with their meditative practices. This survey demonstrated that these meditators had not only better mental and physical health but also that a consistent relationship between health, especially mental health, and selfreported experience of mental silence existed. To investigate the possibility of whether or not this relationship was causal, a series of increasingly rigorous clinical studies were implemented. Two separate observational and case control studies of participants suffering from 1) menopausal symptoms, and 2) attention deficit hyperactivity disorder demonstrated promising outcomes. These were followed by a small but well-designed RCT of meditation for asthma, then the largest RCT of meditation for occupational stress currently in the literature. The latter two studies were specifically designed to exclude non-specific ??placebo?? effects. The outcomes of these studies provided strong evidence that mental silence is associated with a specific, therapeutic effect. Finally, in a heuristic physiological study mental silence meditators manifested reductions in skin temperature during meditation thereby contradicting the ??reduced physiological arousal?? conceptualisation of meditation. This and other data are discussed and the possibility that the mental silence experience is associated with a unique pattern of physiological activity is proposed. In conclusion, there is credible evidence to support the idea that Sahaja Yoga meditation, and hence the mental silence experience that typifies it, is associated with unique effects. The ramifications for the fields of meditation research, consciousness and religious studies and healthcare are discussed. Future studies are proposed that focus on further examination of the mental silence state and potential mechanisms by which its specific effects may occur with emphasis on immunogenetic markers and neuroimaging.

Thesis (M.A.)--Liberty University Graduate School of Religion, 1986. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

A growing body of research has supported the benefits of mindfulness practice. However, not many studies investigated its effects on positive human functioning. In addition, most studies treated mindfulness as skills and techniques for achieving bare awareness, without addressing its philosophical underpinnings. In the Buddhist tradition, mindfulness is paying close attention to one’s immediate experience in an attitude of lovingkindness. The essence of mindfulness will be lost if the practice is reduced to skills and techniques for achieving bare awareness. In view of the limitations of past research, the present study compared the effects of the mindfulness practice with pure skills training and the mindfulness practice with lovingkindness. Instead of focusing on clinical problems, the present study examined the effects of mindfulness practice on the personal and social wellbeing of adolescents in school setting. Personal wellbeing was indicated by affect (positive vs. negative), general health, and emotion management whereas social wellbeing was indicated by sense of connectedness, self-report and actual prosocial behaviors. The present study also examined the psychological mechanisms that accounted for the intervention effects on personal and social wellbeing. The participants were 188 junior secondary students (67 girls and 121 boys) from two schools. Their age ranged from 12 to 16 years (M = 13.24). They were assigned randomly to one of the three 8 week programs: Mindfulness, Lovingkindness, or Study Skills. The first program focused on skills and techniques on mindfulness practice. The second program was the same as the first program except that lovingkindness component was included. The last program focused on study skills and served as the control condition. The participants completed a battery of measures prior to and immediately after the training. To investigate the sustainability of intervention effect, they completed the same battery of measures again two months later. Four hypotheses were formulated. Hypothesis 1: Compared to the participants in the control condition, the participants in the mindfulness and lovingkindness programs would have better personal wellbeing after the intervention. Hypothesis 2: Compared to the participants in the control condition and the mindfulness program, the participants in the lovingkindness program would have better social wellbeing after the intervention. Hypothesis 3: With reference to personal wellbeing, emotion management would mediate the intervention effects on affect and general health. Hypothesis 4: With reference to social wellbeing, connectedness would mediate the intervention effect on prosocial behaviors. Consistent with Hypothesis 1, the results showed that compared to the participants in the control condition, the participants in the mindfulness and lovingkindness programs had better personal wellbeing. As for Hypothesis 2, the participants of the mindfulness program also had significant improvement in social wellbeing although the participants of the lovingkindness program had the greatest improvement among the three programs. Consistent with Hypotheses 3, the results revealed that emotion management mediated the intervention effects (mindfulness and lovingkindness vs. control) on affect and general health. As for Hypothesis 4, connectedness mediated the intervention effect (lovingkindness vs. mindfulness and control) on self-report prosocial behaviors. It was also found that connectedness mediated the intervention effect (mindfulness and lovingkindness vs. control) on self-report prosocial behaviors. Intervention effects were still found two months after the training. These results have significant implications for school-based intervention programs on mindfulness practice. / published_or_final_version / Educational Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Psychology

The current study aims to explore the underlying mechanisms of mindfulness in understanding how it can bring about beneficial effects in clinical applications. We adopted a prospective design to examine the impact of a 3-day intensive mindfulness training camp on responses to different categories of words on the Emotional Stroop task (Watts, McKenna, Sharrock, & Trezise, 1986) and compared the performance of this group of participants with that of a control group. Five Facets of Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ; Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer, & Toney, 2006) and Trait Meta Mood Scale (TMMS; Salovey, Mayer, Goldman, Turvey, & Palfai, 1995) were also adopted to tap mindfulness and emotional intelligence respectively. Significant effect was found that mindfulness can improve the ability to describe experience, act with awareness, and repair negative mood. For the Emotional Stroop task, although there was no Stroop effect or significant group effect, post hoc analysis found intriguing results that the meditators respond slower for the emotionally neutral word while the changes for the emotional word was similar to the control group. The results provided preliminary supports for the notion that mindfulness training enhanced acuity in analyzing the environment, thus alerting the individual of previously unnoticed stimuli. / published_or_final_version / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

The human brain is a plastic and malleable organ that can be shaped by daily experience. Experience such as learning modifies the architecture and functioning of the brain. Meditation is an experiential process of cultivation of different mental states in the attention or emotion domains. Whilst the effect of meditation practice on the cultivation of attention has mainly been observed in attentional neural systems, its effects on emotion processing are less well understood. Among the many forms of meditation, loving-kindness meditation (LKM) is one that is loaded on emotion processing because it focuses on cultivating positive emotional qualities, such as compassion and kindness, and at the same time, it works to reduce negative emotions. The neuroplastic effect of LKM is worth investigation because of its potential effect on changing neural activity in brain regions for empathy and theory-of-mind. Furthermore, to provide a complete picture of the effect of LKM on affective processing, it is worth exploring the functional connectivity of regions for emotion processing, for example the amygdala. This thesis reports two studies examining the neuroplastic effect of compassionate meditation. Study One (Chapter 2) examines the impact of long-term LKM practice on gray matter, neural activity and amygdalar functional coupling during emotion processing. The LKM expert meditators, relative to the matched meditation novices, had significantly more gray matter in the right angular and posterior parahippocampal gyri; they also had greater activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during negative emotion processing, and stronger functional coupling between the left amygdala and dorsal anterior cingulate, premotor and primary somatosensory cortices during positive emotion processing. Taken into consideration the neural functioning underlying theory-of-mind, executive control, mirror neuron, dorsal and ventral neural systems, LKM expertise may influence brain structures and functioning associated with empathic responses, affective regulation, as well as understanding, sharing, and cultivating positive emotions. To further confirm the direct effect of meditation and the corresponding neuroplastic changes, Study Two (Chapter 3) examined the longitudinal neuroplastic changes induced by a 6-week attention-based compassion meditation (ABCM) program compared with a matched active-control relaxation program. The ABCM training significantly reduced anxiety and enhanced mindfulness compared with relaxation training. Both the right amygdala activity and left amygdala-ventral insula coupling dropped significantly during negative emotion processing after ABCM compared with relaxation trainings. These decreases correlated with more compassion practice and an increase in the perspective-taking score respectively, suggesting ABCM influences neural substrates for empathic responses. Although both trainings induced comparable gray matter increases in the left temporopolar area (TPA), only the TPA enlargement in the ABCM group correlated with an increase in social desirability at the trend-level. Since the TPA is an important paralimbic relay between the limbic and prefrontal cortices for socioemotion processing, ABCM may have unique impacts on socioemotion processing. Taken together, the findings of the studies reported in this thesis add to the literature of neuroplastic changes associated with loving-kindness compassionate meditation. The data carry important implications for the design of intervention programs that incorporate the cultivation of attention-based compassion for alleviating affective dysregulation. / published_or_final_version / Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

The author describes meditative practice in some of its historical and cultural contexts. She then reviews the literature and research on meditation pertinent to attention, the brain, stress, spirituality and personal development. She discusses the implications of meditation research for education. Finally, she presents suggestions and comments concerning the feasibility of implementing meditation in the schools.

Meditation and its underlying ideas are increasingly popular in Western society but the practice itself has been subjected to little high quality scientific scrutiny. In this thesis I describe the outcomes of a research programme aimed at addressing this deficiency. A comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis of the entire English-speaking database of randomised controlled trials clearly demonstrates that the extant data is characterised by a number of methodological and conceptual flaws. As a result there is currently no consistent evidence of a specific effect associated with meditation. The most fundamentally important of these flaws, I propose, is the lack of a consistent and meaningful definition of meditation. Exploring the original descriptions of the meditative experience reveals that a key feature of meditation is the experience of mental silence. Despite this, Western definitions characterise meditation as a method of relaxation, focusing of attention or cognitive modification. The poor performance of meditation in scientific studies may be explained by the fact that definitions of meditation used by Western scientists do not appear to reflect the understanding of meditation as described in the Eastern traditions from which it originated. To explore the salience of the mental silence concept I first conducted a survey of 348 meditators who used a single homogenous form of meditation called Sahaja Yoga which focuses on the experience of mental silence as its defining feature, to assess their functional health and its relationship with their meditative practices. This survey demonstrated that these meditators had not only better mental and physical health but also that a consistent relationship between health, especially mental health, and selfreported experience of mental silence existed. To investigate the possibility of whether or not this relationship was causal, a series of increasingly rigorous clinical studies were implemented. Two separate observational and case control studies of participants suffering from 1) menopausal symptoms, and 2) attention deficit hyperactivity disorder demonstrated promising outcomes. These were followed by a small but well-designed RCT of meditation for asthma, then the largest RCT of meditation for occupational stress currently in the literature. The latter two studies were specifically designed to exclude non-specific ??placebo?? effects. The outcomes of these studies provided strong evidence that mental silence is associated with a specific, therapeutic effect. Finally, in a heuristic physiological study mental silence meditators manifested reductions in skin temperature during meditation thereby contradicting the ??reduced physiological arousal?? conceptualisation of meditation. This and other data are discussed and the possibility that the mental silence experience is associated with a unique pattern of physiological activity is proposed. In conclusion, there is credible evidence to support the idea that Sahaja Yoga meditation, and hence the mental silence experience that typifies it, is associated with unique effects. The ramifications for the fields of meditation research, consciousness and religious studies and healthcare are discussed. Future studies are proposed that focus on further examination of the mental silence state and potential mechanisms by which its specific effects may occur with emphasis on immunogenetic markers and neuroimaging.

Thesis--Wisconsin. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-103).

Thesis--University of Wisconsin. / Bibliography: v. 2, l. 1070-1139.