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A recently published analysis by Lewis and Maslin (Lewis SL and Maslin MA (2015) Defining the Anthropocene. Nature 519: 171–180) has identified two new potential horizons for the Holocene−Anthropocene boundary: 1610 (associated with European colonization of the Americas), or 1964 (the peak of the excess radiocarbon signal arising from atom bomb tests). We discuss both of these novel suggestions, and consider that there is insufficient stratigraphic basis for the former, whereas placing the latter at the peak of the signal rather than at its inception does not follow normal stratigraphical practice. Wherever the boundary is eventually placed, it should be optimized to reflect stratigraphical evidence with the least possible ambiguity.
The ability to accurately infer others’ mental states from facial expressions is important for optimal social functioning and is fundamentally impaired in social cognitive disorders such as autism. While pharmacologic interventions have shown promise for enhancing empathic accuracy, little is known about the effects of behavioral interventions on empathic accuracy and related brain activity. This study employed a randomized, controlled and longitudinal design to investigate the effect of a secularized analytical compassion meditation program, cognitive-based compassion training (CBCT), on empathic accuracy. Twenty-one healthy participants received functional MRI scans while completing an empathic accuracy task, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), both prior to and after completion of either CBCT or a health discussion control group. Upon completion of the study interventions, participants randomized to CBCT and were significantly more likely than control subjects to have increased scores on the RMET and increased neural activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). Moreover, changes in dmPFC and IFG activity from baseline to the post-intervention assessment were associated with changes in empathic accuracy. These findings suggest that CBCT may hold promise as a behavioral intervention for enhancing empathic accuracy and the neurobiology supporting it.
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Objective: To review selected complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatments for major depressive disorder (MDD).Participants: Authors of this report were invited participants in the American Psychiatric Association’s Task Force on Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
Evidence: The group reviewed the literature on individual CAM treatments for MDD, methodological considerations, and future directions for CAM in psychiatry. Individual CAM treatments were reviewed with regard to efficacy in MDD, as well as risks and benefits. Literature searches included MEDLINE and PsycINFO reviews and manual reference searches; electronic searches were limited to English-language publications from 1965 to January 2010 (but manual searches were not restricted by language). Treatments were selected for this review on the basis of (1) published randomized controlled trials in MDD and (2) widespread use with important clinical safety or public health significance relevant to psychiatric practice. An action plan is presented based on needs pertaining to CAM and psychiatry.
Consensus Process: Consensus was reached by group conferences. Written iterations were drafted and sent out among group members prior to discussion, resolution of any differences of interpretation of evidence, and final approval.
Conclusions: A review of randomized controlled trials for commonly used CAM treatments such as omega-3 fatty acids, St John’s wort (Hypericum), folate, S-adenosyl-l-methionine (SAMe), acupuncture, light therapy, exercise, and mindfulness psychotherapies revealed promising results. More rigorous and larger studies are recommended. Each CAM treatment must be evaluated separately in adequately powered controlled trials. At this time, several CAM treatments appear promising and deserve further study. The greatest risk of pursuing a CAM therapy is the possible delay of other well-established treatments. Clinical, research, and educational initiatives designed to focus on CAM in psychiatry are clearly warranted due to the widespread use of CAM therapies.
<p>Contemplative practices are believed to alleviate psychological problems, cultivate prosocial behavior and promote self-awareness. In addition, psychological science has developed tools and models for understanding the mind and promoting well-being. Additional effort is needed to combine frameworks and techniques from these traditions to improve emotional experience and socioemotional behavior. An 8-week intensive (42 hr) meditation/emotion regulation training intervention was designed by experts in contemplative traditions and emotion science to reduce “destructive enactment of emotions” and enhance prosocial responses. Participants were 82 healthy female schoolteachers who were randomly assigned to a training group or a wait-list control group, and assessed preassessment, postassessment, and 5 months after training completion. Assessments included self-reports and experimental tasks to capture changes in emotional behavior. The training group reported reduced trait negative affect, rumination, depression, and anxiety, and increased trait positive affect and mindfulness compared to the control group. On a series of behavioral tasks, the training increased recognition of emotions in others (Micro-Expression Training Tool), protected trainees from some of the psychophysiological effects of an experimental threat to self (Trier Social Stress Test; TSST), appeared to activate cognitive networks associated with compassion (lexical decision procedure), and affected hostile behavior in the Marital Interaction Task. Most effects at postassessment that were examined at follow-up were maintained (excluding positive affect, TSST rumination, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia recovery). Findings suggest that increased awareness of mental processes can influence emotional behavior, and they support the benefit of integrating contemplative theories/practices with psychological models and methods of emotion regulation.</p>
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In this chapter we argue that the increasing use of contemplative practices in lawschools is significant not just in relation to enhancing resilience and diminishing
stress and depression, but that they also have major benefits in the development of
traditional legal roles. However, there is an attitudinal barrier that needs to be
overcome as law students and legal academics have commonly been resistant to the
use of these practices. It is interesting and somewhat ironic, therefore, that just as
we are developing some level of openness to practices that often seem alien to
those in the law, we also find evidence that they indeed enhance capacities for legal
and educational practice such as level of focus, ability to prioritise, the optimisation
of objectivity, higher order thinking and so on. Further, the management of ethical
issues of professional practice, which are frequently triggers for depression, may
also be improved by contemplative practices as they enhance students’ and lawyers’
ability to articulate their personal and professional ethics. In turn, this knowledge can
be used to help break down remaining barriers to the use of contemplative practices
within the legal academy. To reiterate, until recently the supposition was that the
remedial benefits of contemplative practices ameliorated negative aspects of legal
education and practice. However, now it appears that the enhancement may also be
linked to a direct correspondence between contemplation and the law.
<p><strong>Creator's Description</strong>: This paper examines the reception, development, and classification of the Abhisamayālaṃkāra and its related commentaries from the ninth to fourteenth centuries in Tibet as a case study in how sections of the Tibetan Bstan 'gyur collections were formed and formulated. The first section of the paper analyzes the classification of Abhisamayālaṃkāra commentaries in early Tibetan registers such as the Lhan kar ma and 'Phang thang ma. Next, two influential Tibetan scholar-librarians, Bcom ldan rig pa'i ral gri (1227-1305) and Bu ston rin chen grub (1290-1364), are compared with regard to their organization and classification of treatises such as the Abhisamayālaṃkāra. The third section provides a narrative account of how Abhisamayālaṃkāra literature developed in Tibet based on the analysis of colophons and historical anecdotes. The paper concludes with a summary of the cultural forces that influenced the development and classification of Abhisamayālaṃkāra literature in Tibet.</p>
This study evaluated the effectiveness of an eight-session mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) group intervention programme for treating depression in coronary heart disease (CHD) patients. Thirty-two depressed CHD patients were assigned to an MBCT treatment group, and a demographically and clinically similar group of 30 cases were assigned to a waiting list control group. Participants were evaluated at baseline, 8 weeks, and 6-month follow-up with the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), Profile of Mood States (POMS), Psychosocial Adjustment to Illness Scale (PAIS) and the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS). After each session, MBCT participants completed the post-session Questionnaire on helpful aspects of therapy and after the programme, completed the Client Satisfaction Questionnaire. At follow-up, 71 % of the MBCT group was clinically recovered from depression compared with 50 % of the control group. The MBCT group showed significantly greater improvement than the control group on all measures with effect sizes at follow-up of d = 0.43–1.0. Increases in mindfulness on the MAAS correlated significantly with improvements on the HADS, BSI, POMS and PAIS. Key helpful aspects of therapy identified by MBCT participants included learning meditation, obtaining group support and developing optimism. There was a high level of satisfaction with the MBCT programme. These results indicate that a randomized controlled trial of MBCT for depressed CHD patients is now warranted.
Theoretical models suggest that social networks influence the evolution of cooperation, but to date there have been few experimental studies. Observational data suggest that a wide variety of behaviors may spread in human social networks, but subjects in such studies can choose to befriend people with similar behaviors, posing difficulty for causal inference. Here, we exploit a seminal set of laboratory experiments that originally showed that voluntary costly punishment can help sustain cooperation. In these experiments, subjects were randomly assigned to a sequence of different groups to play a series of single-shot public goods games with strangers; this feature allowed us to draw networks of interactions to explore how cooperative and uncooperative behaviors spread from person to person to person. We show that, in both an ordinary public goods game and in a public goods game with punishment, focal individuals are influenced by fellow group members’ contribution behavior in future interactions with other individuals who were not a party to the initial interaction. Furthermore, this influence persists for multiple periods and spreads up to three degrees of separation (from person to person to person to person). The results suggest that each additional contribution a subject makes to the public good in the first period is tripled over the course of the experiment by other subjects who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more as a consequence. These results show experimentally that cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks.
Achieving social wellbeing and sustainability have become interwoven developmental aspirations without being adequately theorised.
Objective:In college student samples, the association between depressive symptoms and alcohol-related problems has been found to be mediated by drinking-to-cope motives. Mindfulness-based interventions suggest that mindfulness may attenuate the conditioned response of using substances in response to negative emotional states, and trait mindfulness has been shown to be a protective factor associated with experiencing fewer alcohol-related problems. In the present study, we examined trait mindfulness as a moderator of the indirect associations of depressive symptoms on alcohol-related problems via drinking-to-cope motives.Method:Participants were undergraduate students at a large, southeastern university in the United States who drank at least once in the previous month (n = 448). Participants completed an online survey regarding their personal mental health, coping strategies, trait mindfulness, and alcohol use behaviors. The majority of participants were female (n = 302; 67.4%), identified as being either White nonHispanic (n = 213; 47.5%) or African American (n = 119; 26.6%), and reported a mean age of 22.74 (SD = 6.81) years. Further, 110 (25%) participants reported having a previous and/or current experience with mindfulness mediation.Results:As hypothesized, the indirect effects from depressive symptoms to alcohol-related problems via drinking-to-cope motives were weaker among individuals reporting higher levels of mindfulness than among individuals reporting lower and average levels of mindfulness.Conclusions:The present study suggests a possible mechanism through which mindfulness-based interventions may be efficacious among college students: decoupling the associations between depressive symptoms and drinking-to-cope motives.
ObjectivesDespite the increasing prevalence of mindfulness-based interventions in sport, no context-specific instrument currently exists to measure mindfulness in sport. The Mindfulness Inventory for Sport (MIS) was devised using a three-stage approach, to measure one's ability to: (1) be aware of disruptive stimuli and their associated internal reactions; (2) adopt a non-judgmental attitude towards these stimuli and reactions; and (3) quickly refocus attention on goal-related cues.
Method
In stage 1, a pool of items was developed and assessed by six experts in the areas of mindfulness and instrument validation. In stage 2, exploratory factor analyses with data collected from undergraduate student-athletes (N = 370) resulted in a three-factor, 19-item version of the instrument. In stage 3, confirmatory analyses using structural equation modelling were conducted with a sample of elite athletes (N = 343).
Results and conclusion
A final 15-item three-factor version displayed an acceptable model fit, with little evidence of invariance demonstrated across sport type and partial invariance across gender. In addition, the subscales of the MIS displayed significant correlations with conceptually-related variables such as flow, worry, concentration disruption, and perfectionism.
Individual variation in the experience and expression of pleasure may relate to differential patterns of lateral frontal activity. Brain electrical measures have been used to study the asymmetric involvement of lateral frontal cortex in positive emotion, but the excellent time resolution of these measures has not been used to capture second-by-second changes in ongoing emotion until now. The relationship between pleasure and second-by-second lateral frontal activity was examined with the use of hierarchical linear modeling in a sample of 128 children ages 6-10 years. Electroencephalographic activity was recorded during "pop-out toy," a standardized task that elicits pleasure. The task consisted of 3 epochs: an anticipation period sandwiched between 2 play periods. The amount of pleasure expressed during the task predicted the pattern of nonlinear change in lateral frontal activity. Children who expressed increasing amounts of pleasure during the task exhibited increasing left lateral frontal activity during the task, whereas children who expressed contentment exhibited increasing right/decreasing left activity. These findings indicate that task-dependent changes in pleasure relate to dynamic, nonlinear changes in lateral frontal activity as the task unfolds.
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OBJECTIVES: Emerging research is revealing that direct physical contact of the human body with the surface of the earth (grounding or earthing) has intriguing effects on human physiology and health, including beneficial effects on various cardiovascular risk factors. This study examined effects of 2 hours of grounding on the electrical charge (zeta potential) on red blood cells (RBCs) and the effects on the extent of RBC clumping.DESIGN/INTERVENTIONS: SUBJECTS were grounded with conductive patches on the soles of their feet and palms of their hands. Wires connected the patches to a stainless-steel rod inserted in the earth outdoors. Small fingertip pinprick blood samples were placed on microscope slides and an electric field was applied to them. Electrophoretic mobility of the RBCs was determined by measuring terminal velocities of the cells in video recordings taken through a microscope. RBC aggregation was measured by counting the numbers of clustered cells in each sample.
SETTINGS/LOCATION: Each subject sat in a comfortable reclining chair in a soundproof experiment room with the lights dimmed or off.
SUBJECTS: Ten (10) healthy adult subjects were recruited by word-of-mouth.
RESULTS: Earthing or grounding increased zeta potentials in all samples by an average of 2.70 and significantly reduced RBC aggregation.
CONCLUSIONS: Grounding increases the surface charge on RBCs and thereby reduces blood viscosity and clumping. GrSounding appears to be one of the simplest and yet most profound interventions for helping reduce cardiovascular risk and cardiovascular events.
Environmental medicine generally addresses environmental factors with a negative impact on human health. However, emerging scientific research has revealed a surprisingly positive and overlooked environmental factor on health: direct physical contact with the vast supply of electrons on the surface of the Earth. Modern lifestyle separates humans from such contact. The research suggests that this disconnect may be a major contributor to physiological dysfunction and unwellness. Reconnection with the Earth's electrons has been found to promote intriguing physiological changes and subjective reports of well-being. Earthing (or grounding) refers to the discovery of benefits—including better sleep and reduced pain—from walking barefoot outside or sitting, working, or sleeping indoors connected to conductive systems that transfer the Earth's electrons from the ground into the body. This paper reviews the earthing research and the potential of earthing as a simple and easily accessed global modality of significant clinical importance.
Background: Antenatal depression and anxiety are associated with adverse obstetric and mental health outcomes, yet practicable nonpharmacological therapies, particularly for the latter, are lacking. Yoga incorporates relaxation and breathing techniques with postures that can be customized for pregnant women. This study tested the efficacy of yoga as an intervention for reducing maternal anxiety during pregnancy. Methods: Fifty-nine primiparous, low-risk pregnant women completed questionnaires assessing state (State Trait Anxiety Inventory; STAI-State), trait (STAI-Trait), and pregnancy-specific anxiety (Wijma Delivery Expectancy Questionnaire; WDEQ) and depression (Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale; EPDS) before randomization (baseline) to either an 8-week course of antenatal yoga or treatment-as-usual (TAU); both groups repeated the questionnaires at follow-up. The yoga group also completed pre- and postsession state anxiety and stress hormone assessments at both the first and last session of the 8-week course. Results: A single session of yoga reduced both subjective and physiological measures of state anxiety (STAI-S and cortisol); and this class-induced reduction in anxiety remained at the final session of the intervention. Multiple linear regression analyses identified allocation to yoga as predictive of greater reduction in WDEQ scores (B = -9.59; BCa 95% CI = -18.25 to -0.43; P = .014; d = -0.57), while allocation to TAU was predictive of significantly increased elevation in EPDS scores (B = -3.06; BCa 95% CI = -5.9 to -0.17; P = .042; d = -0.5). No significant differences were observed in state or trait anxiety scores between baseline and follow-up. Conclusion: Antenatal yoga seems to be useful for reducing women's anxieties toward childbirth and preventing increases in depressive symptomatology. (C) 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Background: Antenatal depression and anxiety are associated with adverse obstetric and mental health outcomes, yet practicable nonpharmacological therapies, particularly for the latter, are lacking. Yoga incorporates relaxation and breathing techniques with postures that can be customized for pregnant women. This study tested the efficacy of yoga as an intervention for reducing maternal anxiety during pregnancy. Methods: Fifty-nine primiparous, low-risk pregnant women completed questionnaires assessing state (State Trait Anxiety Inventory; STAI-State), trait (STAI-Trait), and pregnancy-specific anxiety (Wijma Delivery Expectancy Questionnaire; WDEQ) and depression (Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale; EPDS) before randomization (baseline) to either an 8-week course of antenatal yoga or treatment-as-usual (TAU); both groups repeated the questionnaires at follow-up. The yoga group also completed pre- and postsession state anxiety and stress hormone assessments at both the first and last session of the 8-week course. Results: A single session of yoga reduced both subjective and physiological measures of state anxiety (STAI-S and cortisol); and this class-induced reduction in anxiety remained at the final session of the intervention. Multiple linear regression analyses identified allocation to yoga as predictive of greater reduction in WDEQ scores (B = -9.59; BCa 95% CI = -18.25 to -0.43; P = .014; d = -0.57), while allocation to TAU was predictive of significantly increased elevation in EPDS scores (B = -3.06; BCa 95% CI = -5.9 to -0.17; P = .042; d = -0.5). No significant differences were observed in state or trait anxiety scores between baseline and follow-up. Conclusion: Antenatal yoga seems to be useful for reducing women's anxieties toward childbirth and preventing increases in depressive symptomatology. (C) 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Multi-disciplinary research has revealed that electrically conductive contact of the human body with the surface of the Earth (grounding or earthing) produces intriguing effects on physiology and health. Such effects relate to inflammation, immune responses, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The purpose of this report is two-fold: to 1) inform researchers about what appears to be a new perspective to the study of inflammation, and 2) alert researchers that the length of time and degree (resistance to ground) of grounding of experimental animals is an important but usually overlooked factor that can influence outcomes of studies of inflammation, wound healing, and tumorigenesis. Specifically, grounding an organism produces measurable differences in the concentrations of white blood cells, cytokines, and other molecules involved in the inflammatory response. We present several hypotheses to explain observed effects, based on current research results and our understanding of the electronic aspects of cell and tissue physiology, cell biology, biophysics, and biochemistry. An experimental injury to muscles, known as delayed onset muscle soreness, has been used to monitor the immune response under grounded versus ungrounded conditions. Grounding reduces pain and alters the numbers of circulating neutrophils and lymphocytes, and also affects various circulating chemical factors related to inflammation.
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