Dismantling Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy: Creation and validation of 8-week focused attention and open monitoring interventions within a 3-armed randomized controlled trial.

Background: While mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) employ two distinct practices, focused attention (FA) and open monitoring (OM), the integrated delivery of these practices in MBIs precludes understanding of their practice-specific effects or mechanisms of action. The purpose of this study is to isolate hypothesized active ingredients and practice-specific mechanistic target engagement by creating structurally equivalent interventions that differ only by the active ingredient (meditation practice) offered and to test whether the hypothesized components differentially engage the mechanistic targets that they are purported to engage.

Methods: Participants were intended to be representative of American meditators and had mild to severe affective disturbances.

Electrochemical Ion-Exchange Regeneration and Fluidized Bed Crystallization for Zero-Liquid-Discharge Water Softening.

This research investigated the use of an electrochemical system for regenerating ion-exchange media and for promoting the crystallization of hardness minerals in a fluidized bed crystallization reactor (FBCR). The closed-loop process eliminates the creation of waste brine solutions that are normally produced when regenerating ion-exchange media. A bipolar membrane electrodialysis stack was used to generate acids and bases from 100 mM salt solutions.

Development and Validation of the Behavioral Tendencies Questionnaire.

At a fundamental level, taxonomy of behavior and behavioral tendencies can be described in terms of approach, avoid, or equivocate (i.e., neither approach nor avoid).

Awakening is not a metaphor: the effects of Buddhist meditation practices on basic wakefulness.

Buddhist meditation practices have become a topic of widespread interest in both science and medicine. Traditional Buddhist formulations describe meditation as a state of relaxed alertness that must guard against both excessive hyperarousal (restlessness) and excessive hypoarousal (drowsiness, sleep). Modern applications of meditation have emphasized the hypoarousing and relaxing effects without as much emphasis on the arousing or alertness-promoting effects.

Why is it so hard to pay attention, or is it? Mindfulness, the factors of awakening and reward-based learning.

Though relatively new to Western psychological and spiritual cultures, mindfulness training is becoming more widespread in the general public and is beginning to show promise therapeutically for maladies ranging from generalized stress to specific addictions. However, difficulties remain both with individuals being able to learn core concepts and techniques, such as concentration meditation, and more broadly, with treatment interventions not being optimized to helping individuals learn these. In this manuscript, we examine possible contributing factors to these difficulties.

Effortless awareness: using real time neurofeedback to investigate correlates of posterior cingulate cortex activity in meditators' self-report.

Neurophenomenological studies seek to utilize first-person self-report to elucidate cognitive processes related to physiological data. Grounded theory offers an approach to the qualitative analysis of self-report, whereby theoretical constructs are derived from empirical data. Here we used grounded theory methodology (GTM) to assess how the first-person experience of meditation relates to neural activity in a core region of the default mode network-the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC).

Craving to quit: psychological models and neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness training as treatment for addictions.

Humans suffer heavily from substance use disorders and other addictions. Despite much effort that has been put into understanding the mechanisms of the addictive process, treatment strategies have remained suboptimal over the past several decades. Mindfulness training, which is based on ancient Buddhist models of human suffering, has recently shown preliminary efficacy in treating addictions.