I feel your pain: higher empathy is associated with higher posterior default mode network activity.

Empathy is characterized as the ability to share one's experience and is associated with altruism. Previous work using blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI) has found that empathy is associated with greater activation in brain mechanisms supporting mentalizing (temporoparietal junction), salience (anterior cingulate cortex; insula), and self-reference (medial prefrontal cortex; precuneus). However, BOLD fMRI has some limitations that may not reliably capture the tonic experience of empathy.

The microbiome diversifies -acyl lipid pools - including short-chain fatty acid-derived compounds.

-acyl lipids are important mediators of several biological processes including immune function and stress response. To enhance the detection of -acyl lipids with untargeted mass spectrometry-based metabolomics, we created a reference spectral library retrieving -acyl lipid patterns from 2,700 public datasets, identifying 851 -acyl lipids that were detected 356,542 times. 777 are not documented in lipid structural databases, with 18% of these derived from short-chain fatty acids and found in the digestive tract and other organs.

Self-regulated analgesia in males but not females is mediated by endogenous opioids.

Converging lines of preclinical and clinical research indicate that females, in stark contrast to males, display an increased prevalence of chronic pain. Females also demonstrate weaker analgesic efficacy in response to opioid therapies when compared with males. These sex-specific differences may be driven by dimorphic endogenous opioidergic responses.

Empirically establishing drug exposure records directly from untargeted metabolomics data.

Despite extensive efforts, extracting information on medication exposure from clinical records remains challenging. To complement this approach, we developed the tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) based GNPS Drug Library. This resource integrates MS/MS data for drugs and their metabolites/analogs with controlled vocabularies on exposure sources, pharmacologic classes, therapeutic indications, and mechanisms of action.

Measures of empathy and compassion: A scoping review.

Evidence to date indicates that compassion and empathy are health-enhancing qualities. Research points to interventions and practices involving compassion and empathy being beneficial, as well as being salient outcomes of contemplative practices such as mindfulness. Advancing the science of compassion and empathy requires that we select measures best suited to evaluating effectiveness of training and answering research questions.

The role of endogenous opioids in mindfulness and sham mindfulness-meditation for the direct alleviation of evoked chronic low back pain: a randomized clinical trial.

Chronic low back pain (cLBP) is the most prevalent chronic pain condition. There are no treatments that haven been found to directly assuage evoked cLBP. To this extent, mindfulness-meditation is a promising pain therapy.

WITHDRAWN: I feel your pain: Higher empathy is associated with higher posterior default mode network activity.

The authors discovered an error in the primary analysis and have withdrawn the results from this version of the investigation.

The Effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on Trauma in Victims of Gun Violence: a Pilot Study.

Objectives: Gun violence is a significant problem in the United States of America. Gun violence produces lifelong psychological adversity, trauma, and grief. In the face of this epidemic, efficacious therapies that assuage gun violence-based trauma and negative health are lacking.