Category: Spirituality

— Phenotypes are measurable and/or observable traits or behaviors. The heritability of an alcohol-related phenotype depends upon the social environment within which it is measured, such as urbanicity, marital status, or religiosity. A new study of the effects of religiosity on the genetic variance of problem alcohol use in males and females has found that religiosity can moderate genetic effects on problem alcohol use during adolescence but not during early adulthood.

Results will be published in the September 2010 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"Levels of alcohol-related phenotypes, such as frequencies of drinking and intoxication, can be dependent on social background," explained Tanya M.M. Button, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder and corresponding author for the study.

"For instance, people with a religious background may be less likely to express alcohol-related phenotypes than those from nonreligious backgrounds," she said. "Furthermore, the influence of genes on these phenotypes also varies according to social background. We also know that genes play a more important role in alcohol-related phenotypes in people from urban backgrounds, unmarried women, and nonreligious individuals than those from rural backgrounds, married women, or those with a religious upbringing."

Button and her colleagues examined 1,432 twin pairs: categorized as identical or monozygotic (MZ) if they had similar physical characteristics and were concordant on all markers; and fraternal or dizygotic (DZ) if they presented with dissimilar physical characteristics and were discordant on any of the markers. For the two time periods examined, adolescence and early adulthood, participants were: 312 male MZ pairs, 379 female MZ pairs, 231 male DZ pairs, 235 female DZ pairs, and 275 opposite-sex DZ pairs. Religiosity was measured using the Value on Religion Scale, and problem alcohol use was measured using the Composite International Diagnostic Interview-Substance Abuse Module.

"Our study showed that genetic factors could influence problem alcohol use more in nonreligious adolescents than adolescents with a greater religious outlook," said Button. "This attenuation in religious participants indicates that religiosity exerted a strong enough influence over the behavior of religious individuals to override any genetic predisposition. The same was not true for young adults, however, for whom the genetic influence was consistent across levels of religiosity."

Button noted that she and her colleagues had expected to find a similar pattern of effects in adolescents and young adults.

"These findings provide evidence that problem alcohol use in adolescents is subject to controlling influences associated with religiosity, even when genetic risks are present," said Button. "Thus, adolescents who are raised to value religious concepts are less likely to develop problems with alcohol use, even in the presence of a genetic predisposition for doing so."

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Journal Reference:

1. Tanya M. M. Button, John K. Hewitt, Soo H. Rhee, Robin P. Corley, Michael C. Stallings. The Moderating Effect of Religiosity on the Genetic Variance of Problem Alcohol Use. Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, 2010; DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-0277.2010.01247.x

Why is there so much disagreement about whether using recreational drugs is morally wrong? A University of Pennsylvania psychology study shows that the debate about drugs might really be about sex.

The study compared two competing theories.

One theory — the conventional wisdom in political science — sees drug attitudes as primarily coming from people's political ideology, level of religious commitment, and personality, for example, openness to experience.

The other theory, proposed by the researchers and driven by ideas from evolutionary psychology, holds that drug attitudes are really driven by people's reproductive strategies.

When the Penn researchers questioned almost 1,000 people in two subject populations, one undergraduate and one Internet-based, a clear winner emerged between the competing theories: Differences in reproductive strategies are driving individuals' different views on recreational drugs.

While many items predict to some extent whether people are opposed to recreational drugs, the most closely related predictors are people's views on sexual promiscuity. While people who are more religious and those who are more politically conservative do tend to oppose recreational drugs, in both study samples the predictive power of these religious and ideological items was reduced nearly to zero by controlling for items tracking attitudes toward sexual promiscuity.

"This provides evidence that views on sex and views on drugs are very closely related," said Kurzban, associate professor in the Department of Psychology and director of the Pennsylvania Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology at Penn. "If you were to measure people's political ideology, religiosity and personality characteristics, you can predict to some degree how people feel about recreational drugs. But if, instead, you just measure how people feel about casual sex, and ignore the abstract items, the predictions about people's views on drugs in fact become quite a bit better."

From a theoretical perspective, the study also concludes that considering morality from the standpoint of strategic reproductive interests is a potentially useful way to understand why humans care about third-party behavior.

According to the researchers' evolutionary model, people develop complex differences in their sexual and reproductive strategies. One key difference that creates strategic conflict arises in people's orientations towards casual sexual activity. The relationships of people following a more committed, monogamous reproductive strategy are put at greater risk when casual sex is prevalent. On the other hand, people pursuing a less committed lifestyle seek to avoid having their choices moralized, forbidden and punished.

The researchers cite prior work showing that recreational drug usage is often associated with promiscuity. The results of the study imply that attitudes against recreational drugs are part of a larger attempt to advance the cause of committed, monogamous reproductive strategies.

"Condemnation of drug usage might be best understood in the context of strategic dynamics, with individuals influencing moral rules in a way that favors their own competitive reproductive strategies," Kurzban said. "We expect that this relationship between sexual strategy and moral stances will occur in other areas as well, such as attitudes toward prostitution, sexual education or abortion."

The research team analyzed questionnaires from 516 undergraduate students from the University of Central Florida and 471 individuals recruited from a Web-based recruitment site, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, or Mturk.

Participants reported their overall liberal/conservative political identification, rated their support or opposition to a number of current political issues and answered questions about their personalities, disgust sensitivity, moral views, sexual attitudes and level of religiosity. The measure of recreational drug attitudes consisted of questions on the morality and legal status of using marijuana, cocaine and Ecstasy, as well as general attitudes towards recreational drugs.

The study, published in the current issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was conducted by Kurzban of Penn's Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences, Jason Weeden of the Pennsylvania Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology at Penn and Amber Dukes of the University of Central Florida.

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Journal Reference:

1. Robert Kurzban, Amber Dukes, Jason Weeden. Sex, drugs and moral goals: reproductive strategies and views about recreational drugs. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2010; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.0608

— People who meditate regularly find pain less unpleasant because their brains anticipate the pain less, a new study has found.

Scientists from The University of Manchester recruited individuals into the study who had a diverse range of experience with meditation, spanning anything from months to decades. It was only the more advanced meditators whose anticipation and experience of pain differed from non-meditators.

The type of meditation practised also varied across individuals, but all included 'mindfulness meditation' practices, such as those that form the basis of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), recommended for recurrent depression by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in 2004.

"Meditation is becoming increasingly popular as a way to treat chronic illness such as the pain caused by arthritis," said Dr Christopher Brown, who conducted the research. "Recently, a mental health charity called for meditation to be routinely available on the NHS to treat depression, which occurs in up to 50% of people with chronic pain. However, scientists have only just started to look into how meditation might reduce the emotional impact of pain."

The study, to be published in the journal Pain, found that particular areas of the brain were less active as meditators anticipated pain, as induced by a laser device. Those with longer meditation experience (up to 35 years) showed the least anticipation of the laser pain.

Dr Brown, who is based in the University's School of Translational Medicine, found that people who meditate also showed unusual activity during anticipation of pain in part of the prefrontal cortex, a brain region known to be involved in controlling attention and thought processes when potential threats are perceived.

He said: "The results of the study confirm how we suspected meditation might affect the brain. Meditation trains the brain to be more present-focused and therefore to spend less time anticipating future negative events. This may be why meditation is effective at reducing the recurrence of depression, which makes chronic pain considerably worse."

Dr Brown said the findings should encourage further research into how the brain is changed by meditation practice. He said: "Although we found that meditators anticipate pain less and find pain less unpleasant, it's not clear precisely how meditation changes brain function over time to produce these effects.

"However, the importance of developing new treatments for chronic pain is clear: 40% of people who suffer from chronic pain report inadequate management of their pain problem."

In the UK, more than 10 million adults consult their GP each year with arthritis and related conditions. The estimated annual direct cost of these conditions to health and social services is £5.7 billion.

Study co-author Professor Anthony Jones said: "One might argue that if a therapy works, then why should we care how it works? But it may be surprising to learn that the mechanisms of action of many current therapies are largely unknown, a fact that hinders the development of new treatments. Understanding how meditation works would help improve this method of treatment and help in the development of new therapies.

"There may also be some types of patient with chronic pain who benefit more from meditation-based therapies than others. If we can find out the mechanism of action of meditation for reducing pain, we may be able to screen patients in the future for deficiencies in that mechanism, allowing us to target the treatment to those people.

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Journal Reference:

1. Christopher A. Brown, Anthony K.P. Jones. Meditation experience predicts less negative appraisal of pain: Electrophysiological evidence for the involvement of anticipatory neural responses. Pain, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.pain.2010.04.017

Some of us need regular amounts of coffee or other chemical enhancers to make us cognitively sharper. A newly published study suggests perhaps a brief bit of meditation would prepare us just as well.

While past research using neuroimaging technology has shown that meditation techniques can promote significant changes in brain areas associated with concentration, it has always been assumed that extensive training was required to achieve this effect. Though many people would like to boost their cognitive abilities, the monk-like discipline required seems like a daunting time commitment and financial cost for this benefit.

Surprisingly, the benefits may be achievable even without all the work. Though it sounds almost like an advertisement for a "miracle" weight-loss product, new research now suggests that the mind may be easier to cognitively train than we previously believed. Psychologists studying the effects of a meditation technique known as "mindfulness " found that meditation-trained participants showed a significant improvement in their critical cognitive skills (and performed significantly higher in cognitive tests than a control group) after only four days of training for only 20 minutes each day.

"In the behavioral test results, what we are seeing is something that is somewhat comparable to results that have been documented after far more extensive training," said Fadel Zeidan, a post-doctoral researcher at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and a former doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where the research was conducted.

"Simply stated, the profound improvements that we found after just 4 days of meditation training- are really surprising," Zeidan noted. "It goes to show that the mind is, in fact, easily changeable and highly influenced, especially by meditation."

The study appears in the April 2 issue of Consciousness and Cognition. Zeidan's co-authors are Susan K. Johnson, Zhanna David and Paula Goolkasian from the Department of Psychology at UNC Charlotte, and Bruce J. Diamond from William Patterson University. The research was also part of Zeidan's doctoral dissertation. The research will also be presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society's annual meeting in Montreal, April 17-20.

The experiment involved 63 student volunteers, 49 of whom completed the experiment. Participants were randomly assigned in approximately equivalent numbers to one of two groups, one of which received the meditation training while the other group listened for equivalent periods of time to a book (J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit) being read aloud.

Prior to and following the meditation and reading sessions, the participants were subjected to a broad battery of behavioral tests assessing mood, memory, visual attention, attention processing, and vigilance.

Both groups performed equally on all measures at the beginning of the experiment. Both groups also improved following the meditation and reading experiences in measures of mood, but only the group that received the meditation training improved significantly in the cognitive measures. The meditation group scored consistently higher averages than the reading/listening group on all the cognitive tests and as much as ten times better on one challenging test that involved sustaining the ability to focus, while holding other information in mind.

"The meditation group did especially better on all the cognitive tests that were timed," Zeidan noted. "In tasks where participants had to process information under time constraints causing stress, the group briefly trained in mindfulness performed significantly better."

Particularly of note were the differing results on a "computer adaptive n-back task," where participants would have to correctly remember if a stimulus had been shown two steps earlier in a sequence. If the participant got the answer right, the computer would react by increasing the speed of the subsequent stimulus, further increasing the difficulty of the task. The meditation-trained group averaged aproximately10 consecutive correct answers, while the listening group averaged approximately one.

"Findings like these suggest that meditation's benefits may not require extensive training to be realized, and that meditation's first benefits may be associated with increasing the ability to sustain attention," Zeidan said.

"Further study is warranted," he stressed, noting that brain imaging studies would be helpful in confirming the brain changes that the behavioral tests seem to indicate, "but this seems to be strong evidence for the idea that we may be able to modify our own minds to improve our cognitive processing — most importantly in the ability to sustain attention and vigilance — within a week's time."

The meditation training involved in the study was an abbreviated "mindfulness" training regime modeled on basic "Shamatha skills" from a Buddhist meditation tradition, conducted by a trained facilitator. As described in the paper, "participants were instructed to relax, with their eyes closed, and to simply focus on the flow of their breath occurring at the tip of their nose. If a random thought arose, they were told to passively notice and acknowledge the thought and to simply let 'it' go, by bringing the attention back to the sensations of the breath." Subsequent training built on this basic model, teaching physical awareness, focus, and mindfulness with regard to distraction.

Zeidan likens the brief training the participants received to a kind of mental calisthenics that prepared their minds for cognitive activity.

"The simple process of focusing on the breath in a relaxed manner, in a way that teaches you to regulate your emotions by raising one's awareness of mental processes as they're happening is like working out a bicep, but you are doing it to your brain. Mindfulness meditation teaches you to release sensory events that would easily distract, whether it is your own thoughts or an external noise, in an emotion-regulating fashion. This can lead to better, more efficient performance on the intended task."

"This kind of training seems to prepare the mind for activity, but it's not necessarily permanent," Zeidan cautions. "This doesn't mean that you meditate for four days and you're done — you need to keep practicing."

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Journal Reference:

1. Zeidan et al. Mindfulness meditation improves cognition: Evidence of brief mental training. Consciousness and Cognition, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2010.03.014

— People who pursue happiness through material possessions are liked less by their peers than people who pursue happiness through life experiences, according to a new study led by University of Colorado at Boulder psychology Professor Leaf Van Boven.

Van Boven has spent a decade studying the social costs and benefits of pursuing happiness through the acquisition of life experiences such as traveling and going to concerts versus the purchase of material possessions like fancy cars and jewelry.

"We have found that material possessions don't provide as much enduring happiness as the pursuit of life experiences," Van Boven said.

The "take home" message in his most recent study, which appears in this month's edition of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, is that not only will investing in material possessions make us less happy than investing in life experiences, but that it often makes us less popular among our peers as well.

"The mistake we can sometimes make is believing that pursuing material possessions will gain us status and admiration while also improving our social relationships," Van Boven said. "In fact, it seems to have exactly the opposite effect. This is really problematic because we know that having quality social relationships is one of the best predictors of happiness, health and well-being.

"So for many of us we should rethink these decisions that we might make in terms of pursuing material possessions versus life experiences," he said. "Trying to have a happier life by the acquisition of material possessions is probably not a very wise decision."

CU-Boulder marketing Professor Margaret Campbell and Cornell University Professor Thomas Gilovich were co-authors on the study.

Past studies have found that people who are materialistic tend to have lower quality social relationships. They also have fewer and less satisfying friendships.

In the recent study, Van Boven and his colleagues conducted five experiments with undergraduate students and through a national survey. They sought to find out if people had unfavorable stereotypes of materialistic people and to see if these stereotypes led them to like the materialistic people less than those who pursued life experiences.

In one experiment undergraduates who didn't know each other were randomly paired up and assigned to discuss either a material possession or a life experience they had purchased and were happy with. After talking for 15 or 20 minutes they were then asked about their conversation partners by the researchers.

"What we found was that people who had discussed their material possessions liked their conversation partner less than those who had discussed an experience they had purchased," Van Boven said. "They also were less interested in forming a friendship with them, so there's a real social cost to being associated with material possessions rather than life experiences."

In another experiment using a national survey, the researchers told people about someone who had purchased a material item such as a new shirt or a life experience like a concert ticket. They then asked them a number of questions about that person. They found that simply learning that someone made a material purchase caused them to like him or her less than learning that someone made an experiential purchase.

"We have pretty negative stereotypes of people who are materialistic," Van Boven said. "When we asked people to think of someone who is materialistic and describe their personality traits, selfish and self-centered come up pretty frequently. However, when we asked people to describe someone who is more experiential in nature, things like altruistic, friendly and outgoing come up much more frequently."

So what do you do if you're somebody who really likes to buy lots of material possessions?

"The short answer is you should try to change," Van Boven said. "Not just our research, but a lot of other research has found that people who are materialistic incur many mental health costs and social costs — they're less happy and more prone to depression."

Van Boven says one thing you can do is choose to be around people who are less interested in material goods.

"It's not a quick fix, but it can be done," he said. "I think what makes it particularly challenging is that it requires some extra effort and mindfulness about the way we make decisions about how to be happy in life."

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Journal Reference:

1. Van Boven et al. Stigmatizing Materialism: On Stereotypes and Impressions of Materialistic and Experiential Pursuits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2010; 36 (4): 551 DOI: 10.1177/0146167210362790

— It is often thought that smoking is used as a coping strategy to deal with work stress. However, the pressures of work can actually lower a smoker's nicotine dependence, contrary to popular belief. The surprising finding was published in BioMed Central's open access journal, Tobacco Induced Diseases, contradicting even the study researchers' hypothesis.

The German team, led by Anna Schmidt from the University of Cologne, set out to examine the associations between occupational stress factors and nicotine dependence, and examined 197 employed smokers from the Cologne Smoking Study. The Fagerström Test for Nicotine Dependence, an internationally recognized and statistically validated test for assessing the degree of nicotine dependence in smokers, was used to obtain more detailed information about the study participants' smoking behaviour.

The results of the study indicate that employees who experience stress at work are likely to smoke less than they otherwise would, and, thus, they have a lower dependence on nicotine. The authors speculate that the unexpected findings could be explained by long working hours and strict company smoking regulations. Schmidt said, "Heavy workload may drive employees to smoke only in their spare time."

The study also found that being religious, being married, and having a higher level of education have a significant effect on the prevention of nicotine dependence.

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Journal Reference:

1. Anna Schmidt, Melanie Neumann, Markus Wirtz, Nicole Ernstmann, Andrea Staratschek-Jox, Erich Stoelben, Jurgen Wolf and Holger Pfaff. The influence of occupational stress factors on nicotine dependence: a cross sectional study. Tobacco Induced Diseases, 2010; (in press)

— Near death experiences (NDEs), reported to include sensations such as life flashing before the eyes, feelings of peace and joy, and apparent encounters with mystical entities, may be caused by raised levels of carbon dioxide in the blood. Researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access journal Critical Care investigated the unexplained events in 52 cardiac arrest patients.

Zalika Klemenc-Ketis worked with a team of researchers from the University of Maribor, Slovenia, to examine patients who reported NDEs. She said, "Several theories explaining the mechanisms of NDEs exist. We found that in those patients who experienced the phenomenon, blood carbon dioxide levels were significantly higher than in those who did not."

Of the 52 patients, 11 reported NDEs. Their occurrence did not correlate with patients' sex, age, level of education, religious belief, fear of death, time to recovery or drugs given during resuscitation. They were more common in people who had previously experienced NDEs. According to Klemenc-Ketis, "Our study adds new and important information to the field of NDE phenomena. The association with carbon dioxide has never been reported before, and deserves further study."

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Journal Reference:

1. Zalika Klemenc-Ketis, Janko Kersnik and Stefek Grmec. The effect of carbon dioxide on near-death experiences in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survivors: a prospective observational study. Critical Care, (in press)

— Virginia Tech is one of few universities to integrate mindfulness meditation into its Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) program curriculum, according to Eric McCollum, professor of human development and MFT program director in the National Capital Region. "Mindfulness meditation helps students improve their ability to be emotionally present in therapy sessions with clients," he explained. "It helps beginners, who can sometimes feel overwhelmed, stop focusing on themselves and think more about others."

MFT is a three-year master's degree program in the human development department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Although most extensively described in the Buddhist tradition, McCollum teaches mindfulness as a secular practice, compatible with all religious beliefs. Mindfulness meditation involves deliberately focusing one's attention on present experience — thoughts, physical sensations, emotions — and doing one's best to stay present with those experiences without judging them or avoiding the difficult aspects.

Extensive research on mindfulness in health care points to benefits to be gained from the practice. For novice therapists, another advantage is that mindfulness meditation helps them to switch out of problem solving into being more present, more empathetic, and more compassionate, all important aspects of the therapeutic process, said McCollum. He has practiced mindfulness for over 20 years and began to introduce the practice into the Virginia Tech MFT curriculum about five years ago after seeing students struggle to be emotionally available to clients.

Rachel Cramer, an MFT student from Arlington, Va., explained how mindfulness meditation has helped in her interaction with clients. "Thinking back on starting out in the therapist's chair, one of the hardest things for me was to learn to be quiet. Although I thought I understood active listening intellectually, the actual practice of listening without trying to form a response or a counter-argument or an intervention, and just to sit and take in what the other person was saying peacefully, was a huge challenge for me. I think that is where the practice of mindfulness was the most helpful to me. Just having the experience of quieting my inner cacophony in a disciplined way gave me an experience to draw on when sitting with a client.

"In a strange way," Cramer continued, "mindfulness practice helped me get to the point where I could be most quiet and centered when hearing the most difficult things. Without the exposure to mindfulness practice in my first techniques class, I'm not sure I could really have learned to 'sit with someone's pain' just as a witness, without trying to fix the unfixable. This experience also shaped my use of mindfulness, or at least quiet and measured breathing, as a way to help clients slow their own processes down. Slowing them down made a lot more sense to me after I had experienced the value of this myself."

Mindfulness meditation begins in the first year of clinical training. At this juncture, students have taken theory and practice courses but are just beginning actual clinical rotations. They are encountering a variety of issues common to beginning clinicians, such as dealing with anxiety, using a theoretical model effectively, and learning clinic procedures. As a course requirement (but not graded), students keep weekly journals which are read by the instructors over the course of the semester and then returned to them.

According to McCollum, the educational purpose of these journals is to provide an avenue for students to both communicate and reflect on their experience and to provide some accountability for their weekly practice of mindfulness meditation. Although asked to practice for five to 10 minutes daily, there is no penalty for not practicing. "We ask them simply to report their experience, including why they did not practice meditation during a given week. Students are explicitly and frequently encouraged to include both positive and negative experiences, as this is part of mindfulness practice: to accept whatever experience is happening," McCollum said.

Thirteen students gave permission for McCollum to use their journals for a research paper, "Using Mindfulness Meditation to Teach Beginning Therapists Therapeutic Presence: A Qualitative Study," which he coauthored with Diane R. Gehart, professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling at California State University, Northridge. The paper was recently accepted for publication in a future issue of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.

Of the 13 students included in the study, there are seven men and six women ranging in age from 22 to 60. In terms of diversity, one described himself as gay, one identified as Armenian, another Latino, and the remainder as White or Caucasian.

A variety of themes emerged through thematic analysis of these students' journal entries, including the effects of meditation practice, the ability to be present, balancing being and doing modes in therapy, and the development of acceptance and compassion for themselves and for their clients.

Among the study's findings:

• Mindfulness helped students be present in their sessions. They were able to attend to their inner experience during what was happening with the clients in front of them, and further bring these two domains together in the therapist-client interaction. However, the students also made clear that this was not a process of becoming absorbed. They described instances where they were able to remain present with intense or difficult material in sessions without becoming "infected" with it; that is, in contact but not overwhelmed, a theme referred to as "centered."
• The students credited several "effects" of their mindfulness practice with their ability to be present as therapists. They felt they were calmer in general and specifically in their therapy sessions; were more aware of their inner chatter and could either decrease or disconnect from it, and were able to slow down their perceived inner pace or sense of hurry. Finally, some of them used brief periods of formal practice to allow themselves to set aside thoughts and feelings associated with the previous session or with their lives outside of the clinic and focus their attention on what was happening in the current client session.
• The students' experience of presence seems to have formed a foundation for them to shift their mode of being in the session. Being did not become their sole mode in therapy sessions but they appeared to reach more balance between the two modes. What helped them make this shift was seeing the positive effects on the clients of their changed presence. For most students, this came through interaction with clients in the session; some actually meditated with their clients and were encouraged when clients found this a useful experience.
• The students reported explicitly experiencing a sense of compassion and acceptance. As they came to accept themselves in the therapist role, they were better able to accept their clients. Some students came to a stance of compassion that was consistent with the traditional meditation literature — seeing commonality between their own struggles and their clients' struggles and recognizing their shared humanity.

"Our findings suggest that mindfulness meditation may be a useful addition to clinical training," said McCollum.

Continued contact with students who have graduated from the program also provides McCollum with evidence for its effectiveness. One of these is Courtney Powell who earned a MFT master's degree in 2008 and currently resides in San Antonio, Tx.

"When I first thought back about the mindfulness experience, I wasn't sure how much it still applied. I thought, 'I don't practice daily, and I don't use it as often as I should.' Then I realized that I was wrong. I do practice daily and I do use the experience often. However, it's no longer a conscience practice. It's something I've incorporated into who I am and how I deal with the struggles and frustrations I face every day. When I look back and who I was before the mindfulness experience, I realize how I 'became' the stress I experience. I would think about how stress had affected me in the past and how it would affect my future. I would get more frustrated and more irritated… Now, while I experience as much stress as I did before, I am more aware of my present experience and the stress seems outside of who I am. I worry less about how I have experienced it in the past and how it will impact my future. I am also not negative about the experience. I'm aware of it, I notice it, and for the most part, I'm able to let it go."

She continued, "I think that it was important for someone like Dr. McCollum, who truly believes and clearly practices mindfulness, to teach it to us because we could see an example of how it works. He also encouraged us to use the practices with clients and seeing the impact it had on their life experiences was also very powerful."

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Journal Reference:

1. Eric McCollum et al. Using Mindfulness Meditation to Teach Beginning Therapists Therapeutic Presence: A Qualitative Study. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, (in press)

Forget about crystals and candles, and about sitting and breathing in awkward ways. Meditation research explores how the brain works when we refrain from concentration, rumination and intentional thinking. Electrical brain waves suggest that mental activity during meditation is wakeful and relaxed.

"Given the popularity and effectiveness of meditation as a means of alleviating stress and maintaining good health, there is a pressing need for a rigorous investigation of how it affects brain function," says Professor Jim Lagopoulos of Sydney University, Australia. Lagopoulos is the principal investigator of a joint study between his university and researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) on changes in electrical brain activity during nondirective meditation.

Constant brain waves

Whether we are mentally active, resting or asleep, the brain always has some level of electrical activity. The study monitored the frequency and location of electrical brain waves through the use of EEG (electroencephalography). EEG electrodes were placed in standard locations of the scalp using a custom-made hat

Participants were experienced practitioners of Acem Meditation, a nondirective method developed in Norway. They were asked to rest, eyes closed, for 20 minutes, and to meditate for another 20 minutes, in random order. The abundance and location of slow to fast electrical brain waves (delta, theta, alpha, beta) provide a good indication of brain activity.

Relaxed attention with theta

During meditation, theta waves were most abundant in the frontal and middle parts of the brain.

"These types of waves likely originate from a relaxed attention that monitors our inner experiences. Here lies a significant difference between meditation and relaxing without any specific technique," emphasizes Lagopoulos.

"Previous studies have shown that theta waves indicate deep relaxation and occur more frequently in highly experienced meditation practitioners. The source is probably frontal parts of the brain, which are associated with monitoring of other mental processes."

"When we measure mental calm, these regions signal to lower parts of the brain, inducing the physical relaxation response that occurs during meditation."

Silent experiences with alpha

Alpha waves were more abundant in the posterior parts of the brain during meditation than during simple relaxation. They are characteristic of wakeful rest.

"This wave type has been used as a universal sign of relaxation during meditation and other types of rest," comments Professor Øyvind Ellingsen from NTNU. "The amount of alpha waves increases when the brain relaxes from intentional, goal-oriented tasks.This is a sign of deep relaxation, — but it does not mean that the mind is void."

Neuroimaging studies by Malia F. Mason and co-workers at Dartmouth College NH suggest that the normal resting state of the brain is a silent current of thoughts, images and memories that is not induced by sensory input or intentional reasoning, but emerges spontaneously "from within."

"Spontaneous wandering of the mind is something you become more aware of and familiar with when you meditate," continues Ellingsen, who is an experienced practitioner. "This default activity of the brain is often underestimated. It probably represents a kind of mental processing that connects various experiences and emotional residues, puts them into perspective and lays them to rest."

Different from sleep

Delta waves are characteristic of sleep. There was little delta during the relaxing and meditative tasks, confirming that nondirective meditation is different from sleep.

Beta waves occur when the brain is working on goal-oriented tasks, such as planning a date or reflecting actively over a particular issue. EEG showed few beta waves during meditation and resting.

"These findings indicate that you step away from problem solving both when relaxing and during meditation," says Ellingsen.

Nondirective versus concentration

Several studies indicate better relaxation and stress management by meditation techniques where you refrain from trying to control the content of the mind.

"These methods are often described as nondirective, because practitioners do not actively pursue a particular experience or state of mind. They cultivate the ability to tolerate the spontaneous wandering of the mind without getting too much involved. Instead of concentrating on getting away from stressful thought and emotions, you simple let them pass in an effortless way."

Take home message

Nondirective meditation yields more marked changes in electrical brain wave activity associated with wakeful, relaxed attention, than just resting without any specific mental technique.

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Journal Reference:

1. Lagopoulos et al. Increased Theta and Alpha EEG Activity During Nondirective Meditation. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2009; 15 (11): 1187 DOI: 10.1089/acm.2009.0113

 Researchers have long been puzzled by large societies in which strangers routinely engage in voluntary acts of kindness, respect and mutual benefit even though there is often an individual cost involved.

While evolutionary forces associated with kinship and reciprocity can explain such cooperative behavior among other primates, these forces do not easily explain similar behavior in large, unrelated groups, like those that most humans live in.

A new study co-authored by University of California, Davis, anthropologist Richard McElreath and published March 18 in Science suggests that the cooperative nature of each society is at least partly dependent upon historical forces — such as religious beliefs and the growth of market transactions.

The study also found the extent to which a society uses punishment to enforce norms increases and decreases with the number of people in the society.

"It is likely that small and large communities regulate cooperation — mutual defense, conservation, etc. — in different ways, because different mechanisms of monitoring and enforcement of norms work better at different scales of society," explained McElreath, an associate professor of anthropology at UC Davis.

"A small town in Kansas, for example, can likely rely upon reputation and the fact that everyone knows everyone else, while the residents of New York City need some mechanism, like punishment, that can work in the absence of reliable reputations," he said.

McElreath was one of 14 researchers on three different continents who participated in the project detailed in the paper, "Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment." The first author is Joseph Henrich, an associate professor in the departments of Psychology and Economics at the University of British Columbia.

The researchers probed why communities often cooperate in diverse ways, from mutual defense to conservation. People engage in such mutually beneficial acts even though they may be individually costly.

Using behavioral experiments administered across 15 diverse populations, the study sought to measure the influence of three different mechanisms — punishment, market integration and religious beliefs — that might maintain cooperation within societies. Market integration is the extent to which individuals use anonymous, rule-governed transactions to buy and sell goods.

The researchers found that overt punishment, religious beliefs that can act as a form of psychological punishment and market integration each were correlated with fairness in the experiments.

The project received funding from the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Norms and Preferences Network, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the Russell Sage Foundation.

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Journal Reference:

1. Joseph Henrich, Jean Ensminger, Richard McElreath, Abigail Barr, Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Juan Camilo Cardenas, Michael Gurven, Edwins Gwako, Natalie Henrich, Carolyn Lesorogol, Frank Marlowe, David Tracer, and John Ziker. Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment. Science, 19 March 2010 327: 1480-1484 DOI: 10.1126/science.1182238