App-Based Mindfulness for Attenuation of Subjective and Physiological Stress Reactivity in a Population With Elevated Stress: Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Stress-related mental health disorders have steadily increased and contributed to a worldwide disease burden with up to 50% experiencing a stress-related mental health disorder worldwide. Data suggest that only approximately 20%-65% of individuals receive treatment. This gap in receiving treatment may be attributed to barriers such as limited treatment access, negative stigma surrounding mental health treatment, approachability (ie, not having a usual treatment plan or provider), affordability (ie, lack of insurance coverage and high treatment cost), and availability (ie, long waits for appointments) leaving those who need treatment without necessary care.

Brain Endurance Training improves endurance and cognitive performance in road cyclists.

Objectives: To evaluate the effects of brain endurance training (BET) on endurance and cognitive performance in road cyclists.

Design: Two independent randomized controlled pretest-posttest training studies.

Methods: In both studies cyclists trained five times/week for six weeks and completed either cognitive response inhibition tasks (Post-BET group) or listened to neutral sounds (control group) after each training session.

Brain Endurance Training Improves Physical, Cognitive, and Multitasking Performance in Professional Football Players.

Purpose: Brain endurance training (BET)-the combination of physical training with mentally fatiguing tasks-could help athletes adapt and increase their performance during sporting competitions. Here we tested whether BET completed after standard physical training improved physical and mental performance more than physical training alone during a preseason football training camp.

Methods: The study employed a pretest/training/posttest design, with 22 professional football players randomly assigned to BET or a control group.

Trait mindful awareness predicts inter-brain coupling but not individual brain responses during naturalistic face-to-face interactions.

In recent years, the possible benefits of mindfulness meditation have sparked much public and academic interest. Mindfulness emphasizes cultivating awareness of our immediate experience and has been associated with compassion, empathy, and various other prosocial traits. However, neurobiological evidence pertaining to the prosocial benefits of mindfulness in social settings is sparse.

Mindfulness and music interventions in the workplace: assessment of sustained attention and working memory using a crowdsourcing approach.

Background: Occupational stress has huge financial as well as human costs. Application of crowdsourcing might be a way to strengthen the investigation of occupational mental health. Therefore, the aim of the study was to assess Danish employees' stress and cognition by relying on a crowdsourcing approach, as well as investigating the effect of a 30-day mindfulness and music intervention.

Heart rate variability is enhanced during mindfulness practice: A randomized controlled trial involving a 10-day online-based mindfulness intervention.

Objectives: The goal of the present study was to probe the effects of mindfulness practice in a naturalistic setting as opposed to a lab-based environment in the presence of continuous heart rate variability (HRV) measurements. The specific experimental goals were to examine the effects of a brief 10-day online-based mindfulness intervention on both chronic and acute HRV responses.

Method: We conducted a fully randomized 10-day longitudinal trial of mindfulness practice, explicitly controlling for practice effects with an active-control group (music listening) and a non-intervention control group.

Cognitive framing modulates emotional processing through dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex networks: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

Introduction: In this study, we show new evidence for the role of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex-dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC-DLPFC) networks in the cognitive framing of emotional processing.

Method: We displayed neutral and aversive images described as having been sourced from artistic material to one cohort of subjects (i.e.

The effect of mindfulness training on extinction retention.

Anxiety and trauma related disorders are highly prevalent, causing suffering and high costs for society. Current treatment strategies, although effective, only show moderate effect-sizes when compared to adequate control groups demonstrating a need to develop new forms of treatment or optimize existing ones. In order to achieve this, an increased understanding of what mechanisms are involved is needed.

Methodology for tDCS integration with fMRI.

Understanding and reducing variability of response to transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) requires measuring what factors predetermine sensitivity to tDCS and tracking individual response to tDCS. Human trials, animal models, and computational models suggest structural traits and functional states of neural systems are the major sources of this variance. There are 118 published tDCS studies (up to October 1, 2018) that used fMRI as a proxy measure of neural activation to answer mechanistic, predictive, and localization questions about how brain activity is modulated by tDCS.

Short-term mindfulness practice attenuates reward prediction errors signals in the brain.

Activity changes in dopaminergic neurons encode the ongoing discrepancy between expected and actual value of a stimulus, providing a teaching signal for a reward prediction process. Previous work comparing a cohort of long-term Zen meditators to controls demonstrated an attenuation of reward prediction signals to appetitive reward in the striatum. Using a cross-commodity design encompassing primary- and secondary-reward conditioning experiments, the present study asks the question of whether reward prediction signals are causally altered by mindfulness training in naïve subjects.

Belief about Nicotine Modulates Subjective Craving and Insula Activity in Deprived Smokers.

Little is known about the specific neural mechanisms through which cognitive factors influence craving and associated brain responses, despite the initial success of cognitive therapies in treating drug addiction. In this study, we investigated how cognitive factors such as beliefs influence subjective craving and neural activities in nicotine-addicted individuals using model-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and neuropharmacology. Deprived smokers (N = 24) participated in a two-by-two balanced placebo design, which crossed beliefs about nicotine (told "nicotine" vs.

Mindfulness training increases cooperative decision making in economic exchanges: Evidence from fMRI.

Emotions have been shown to exert influences on decision making during economic exchanges. Here we investigate the underlying neural mechanisms of a training regimen which is hypothesized to promote emotional awareness, specifically mindfulness training (MT). We test the hypothesis that MT increases cooperative economic decision making using fMRI in a randomized longitudinal design involving 8weeks of either MT or active control training (CT).

Mindfulness meditation modulates reward prediction errors in a passive conditioning task.

Reinforcement learning models have demonstrated that phasic activity of dopamine neurons during reward expectation encodes information about the predictability of reward and cues that predict reward. Self-control strategies such as those practiced in mindfulness-based approaches is claimed to reduce negative and positive reactions to stimuli suggesting the hypothesis that such training may influence basic reward processing. Using a passive conditioning task and fMRI in a group of experienced mindfulness meditators and age-matched controls, we tested the hypothesis that mindfulness meditation influence reward and reward prediction error (PE) signals.

Belief about nicotine selectively modulates value and reward prediction error signals in smokers.

Little is known about how prior beliefs impact biophysically described processes in the presence of neuroactive drugs, which presents a profound challenge to the understanding of the mechanisms and treatments of addiction. We engineered smokers' prior beliefs about the presence of nicotine in a cigarette smoked before a functional magnetic resonance imaging session where subjects carried out a sequential choice task. Using a model-based approach, we show that smokers' beliefs about nicotine specifically modulated learning signals (value and reward prediction error) defined by a computational model of mesolimbic dopamine systems.

Adaptive neural reward processing during anticipation and receipt of monetary rewards in mindfulness meditators.

Reward seeking is ubiquitous and adaptive in humans. But excessive reward seeking behavior, such as chasing monetary rewards, may lead to diminished subjective well-being. This study examined whether individuals trained in mindfulness meditation show neural evidence of lower susceptibility to monetary rewards.

Mindfulness training modulates value signals in ventromedial prefrontal cortex through input from insular cortex.

Neuroimaging research has demonstrated that ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) encodes value signals that can be modulated by top-down cognitive input such as semantic knowledge, price incentives, and monetary favors suggesting that such biases may have an identified biological basis. It has been hypothesized that mindfulness training (MT) provides one path for gaining control over such top-down influences; yet, there have been no direct tests of this hypothesis. Here, we probe the behavioral and neural effects of MT on value signals in vmPFC in a randomized longitudinal design of 8 weeks of MT on an initially naïve subject cohort.

Cognitive strategies regulate fictive, but not reward prediction error signals in a sequential investment task.

Computational models of reward processing suggest that foregone or fictive outcomes serve as important information sources for learning and augment those generated by experienced rewards (e.g. reward prediction errors).

Domain expertise insulates against judgment bias by monetary favors through a modulation of ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Recent work using an art-viewing paradigm shows that monetary sponsorship of the experiment by a company (a favor) increases the valuation of paintings placed next to the sponsoring corporate logo, an effect that correlates with modulation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). We used the same art-viewing paradigm to test a prevailing idea in the domain of conflict-of-interest: that expertise in a domain insulates against judgment bias even in the presence of a monetary favor. Using a cohort of art experts, we show that monetary favors do not bias the experts' valuation of art, an effect that correlates with a lack of modulation of the VMPFC across sponsorship conditions.

Interoception drives increased rational decision-making in meditators playing the ultimatum game.

Human decision-making is often conceptualized as a competition between cognitive and emotional processes in the brain. Deviations from rational processes are believed to derive from inclusion of emotional factors in decision-making. Here, we investigate whether experienced Buddhist meditators are better equipped to regulate emotional processes compared with controls during economic decision-making in the Ultimatum Game.

Monetary favors and their influence on neural responses and revealed preference.

Favors from a sender to a receiver are known to bias decisions made by the recipient, especially when the decision relates to the sender, a feature of social exchange known as reciprocity. Using an art-viewing paradigm possessing no objectively correct answer for preferring one piece of art over another, we show that sponsorship of the experiment by a company endows the logo of the company with the capacity to bias revealed preference for art displayed next to the logo. Merely offering to sponsor the experiment similarly endowed the gesturing logo of the company with the capacity to bias revealed preferences.

The neural basis of object-context relationships on aesthetic judgment.

The relationship between contextual information and object perception has received considerable attention in neuroimaging studies. In the work reported here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the relationship between aesthetic judgment and images of objects in their normal contextual setting versus images of objects in abnormal contextual settings and the underlying brain activity. When object-context relationships are violated changes in visual perception and aesthetic judgment emerges that exposes the contribution of vision to interpretations shaped by previous experience.

Modulation of aesthetic value by semantic context: an fMRI study.

Aesthetic judgments, like most judgments, depend on context. Whether an object or image is seen in daily life or in an art gallery can significantly modulate the aesthetic value humans attach to it. We investigated the neural system supporting this modulation by presenting human subjects with artworks under different contexts whilst acquiring fMRI data.

Brain correlates of aesthetic expertise: a parametric fMRI study.

Several studies have demonstrated that acquired expertise influences aesthetic judgments. In this paradigm we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study aesthetic judgments of visually presented architectural stimuli and control-stimuli (faces) for a group of architects and a group of non-architects. This design allowed us to test whether level of expertise modulates neural activity in brain areas associated with either perceptual processing, memory, or reward processing.