Publications by authors named "Dusana Dorjee"

The neurocognitive mechanisms associated with mindfulness training in children are not well understood. This randomised controlled study with active and passive control groups examined the impact of an 18-week mindfulness curriculum delivered by schoolteachers on emotion processing in Vietnamese 7- to 11-year-olds. Event-related potential markers indexed emotion processing while children were completing emotional Go/No-Go tasks before and after mindfulness training, and at 6-month follow-up.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

When considering the numerous mindfulness-based and mindfulness-informed programs that have flourished in the past decades it is not always clear that they all refer to the same "mindfulness. " To facilitate more clarity and precision in describing, researching and teaching mindfulness in the secular settings, we propose a classification framework of mindfulness practices, intentions behind them and the experiential understandings the practices may aim to develop. Accordingly, the proposed framework, called the Mindfulness Map, has two axes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Over the past decade there has been an increasing interest in exploring self-compassion as a related and complementary construct to mindfulness. Increases in self-compassion may predict clinical outcomes after MBCT and cultivation of compassion toward self and others is central to CFT. This pilot study compared the impact of MBCT applying implicit self-compassion instructions and CFT employing explicit self-compassion instructions on symptom change, mindfulness, self-compassion, and rumination.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Growing interest in mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) has resulted in increased demand for MBP teachers, raising questions around safeguarding teaching standards. Training literature emphasises the need for appropriate training and meditation experience, yet studies into impact of such variables on participant outcomes are scarce, requiring further investigation. This feasibility pilot study hypothesised that participant outcomes would relate to teachers' mindfulness-based teacher training levels and mindfulness-based teaching and meditation experience.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In a non-randomized controlled study, we investigated the efficacy of a school-based mindfulness curriculum delivered by schoolteachers to older secondary school students (16-18 years). We measured changes in emotion processing indexed by P3b event-related potential (ERP) modulations in an affective oddball task using static human faces. ERPs were recorded to happy and sad face oddballs presented in a stimulus stream of frequent faces with neutral expression, before and after 8 weeks of mindfulness training.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Pre-adolescence is a key developmental period in which complex intrinsic volitional methods of self-regulation are acquired as a result of rapid maturation within the brain networks underlying the self-regulatory processes of attention control and emotion regulation. Fostering adaptive self-regulation skills during this stage of development has strong implications for physical health, emotional and socio-economic outcomes during adulthood. There is a growing interest in mindfulness-based programmes for pre-adolescents with initial findings suggesting self-regulation improvements, however, neurodevelopmental studies on mindfulness with pre-adolescents are scarce.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The term 'contemplative' is now frequently used in the fast growing field of meditation research. Yet, there is no consensus regarding the definition of contemplative science. Meditation studies commonly imply that contemplative practices such as mindfulness or compassion are the subject of contemplative science.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Studies investigating the feasibility and impact of mindfulness programs on emotional well-being when delivered by school teachers in pre-adolescence are scarce. This study reports the findings of a controlled feasibility pilot which assessed acceptability and emotional well-being outcomes of an 8-week mindfulness program (Paws b) for children aged 7-9 years. The program was delivered by school teachers within a regular school curriculum.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mindfulness training is increasingly being introduced in schools, yet studies examining its impact on the developing brain have been scarce. A neurodevelopmental perspective on mindfulness has been advocated as a powerful tool to enhance our understanding of underlying neurocognitive changes that have implications for developmental well-being research and the implementation of mindfulness in education. To stimulate more research in the developmental cognitive neuroscience of mindfulness, this article outlines possible indexes of mindfulness-based change in adolescence, with a focus on event-related brain potential (ERP) markers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Initial research shows that mindfulness training can enhance attention and modulate the affective response. However, links between mindfulness and language processing remain virtually unexplored despite the prominent role of overt and silent negative ruminative speech in depressive and anxiety-related symptomatology. Here, we measured dispositional mindfulness and recorded participants' event-related brain potential responses to positive and negative target words preceded by words congruent or incongruent with the targets in terms of semantic relatedness and emotional valence.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The attentional effects triggered by emotional stimuli in humans have been substantially investigated, but little is known about the impact of affective valence on the processing of meaning. Here, we used a cross-modal priming paradigm involving visually presented adjective-noun dyads and environmental sounds of controlled affective valence to test the contributions of conceptual relatedness and emotional congruence to priming. Participants undergoing event-related potential recording indicated whether target environmental sounds were related in meaning to adjective-noun dyads presented as primes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Although it is relatively well established that access to orthographic codes in production tasks is possible via an autonomous link between meaning and spelling (e.g., Rapp, Benzing, & Caramazza, 1997), the relative contribution of phonology to orthographic access remains unclear.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The dynamic interplay of semantic access during information integration across the verbal and nonverbal domains and sensory modalities is poorly understood. Here, we compared the priming effects of four types of meaningful stimuli (pictures, written words, spoken words, and environmental sounds) on picture and written word targets referring to the same concept in all cases. P3b event-related brain potentials indexed automatic access to semantic memory in the different modalities.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF