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Dharma Gaia explores the ground where Buddhism and ecology meet through writings by the Dalai Lama, Gary Snyder, Thich Nhat Hanh, Allen Ginsberg, Joanna Macy, Robert Aitken, and 25 other Buddhists and ecologists.
College can be a time of immense stress. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to be an effective stress management technique. A significant limitation of the mindfulness literature, however, is a reliance on inactive control groups. We compared a mindfulness intervention with both an ecologically valid, active control (interacting with a dog during a group study break) and a no-treatment control. Participants (n = 74) were randomly assigned to groups, with the treatment groups completing 4 weekly sessions (duration: 1 hr). By the end of the 4th session, those in the mindfulness group exhibited significantly lower state anxiety compared with those in the other groups, while the dog group was also significantly less anxious than the control group. In addition, both the dog and the mindfulness groups exhibited significantly less dysphoric affect than the control group. All of the participants came in for a posttreatment assessment during which they were given a cognitive stressor challenge. Electrocardiogram data were collected during the cognitive challenge allowing us to assess heart rate variability (HRV)—a measure of the body’s ability to modulate the physiological stress response. Participants in the mindfulness group exhibited significantly higher HRV during the cognitive challenge than those in the other 2 groups, signifying a more-adaptive response to stress (p < .05). Individuals in the dog group, meanwhile, were no different from control participants. These preliminary findings suggest that brief mindfulness training can help college students manage their stress in response to the ubiquitous academic and cognitive challenges of college life.
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of 3 nonhormonal therapies for the improvement of menopause-related quality of life in women with vasomotor symptoms. STUDY DESIGN: We conducted a 12-week 3 x 2 randomized, controlled, factorial design trial. Peri-and postmenopausal women, 40-62 years old, were assigned randomly to yoga (n = 107), exercise (n = 106), or usual activity (n = 142) and also assigned randomly to a double-blind comparison of omega-3 (n = 177) or placebo (n = 178) capsules. We performed the following interventions: (1) weekly 90-minute yoga classes with daily at-home practice, (2) individualized facility-based aerobic exercise training 3 times/week, and (3) 0.615 g omega-3 supplement, 3 times/day. The outcomes were assessed with the following scores: Menopausal Quality of Life Questionnaire (MENQOL) total and domain (vasomotor symptoms, psychosocial, physical and sexual). RESULTS: Among 355 randomly assigned women who average age was 54.7 years, 338 women (95%) completed 12-week assessments. Mean baseline vasomotor symptoms frequency was 7.6/day, and the mean baseline total MENQOL score was 3.8 (range, 1-8 from better to worse) with no between-group differences. For yoga compared to usual activity, baseline to 12-week improvements were seen for MENQOL total -0.3 (95% confidence interval, -0.6 to 0; P = .02), vasomotor symptom domain (P = .02), and sexuality domain (P = .03) scores. For women who underwent exercise and omega-3 therapy compared with control subjects, improvements in baseline to 12-week total MENQOL scores were not observed. Exercise showed benefit in the MENQOL physical domain score at 12 weeks (P = .02). CONCLUSION: All women become menopausal, and many of them seek medical advice on ways to improve quality of life; little evidence-based information exists. We found that, among healthy sedentary menopausal women, yoga appears to improve menopausal quality of life; the clinical significance of our finding is uncertain because of the modest effect.
Facial expressions of pain are an important part of the pain response, signaling distress to others and eliciting social support. To evaluate how voluntary modulation of this response contributes to the pain experience, 29 subjects were exposed to thermal stimulation while making standardized pain, control, or relaxed faces. Dependent measures were self-reported negative effect (valence and arousal) as well as the intensity of nociceptive stimulation required to reach a given subjective level of pain. No direct social feedback was given by the experimenter. Although the amount of nociceptive stimulation did not differ across face conditions, subjects reported more negative effects in response to painful stimulation while holding the pain face. Subsequent analyses suggested the effects were not due to preexisting differences in the difficulty or unpleasantness of making the pain face. These results suggest that voluntary pain expressions have no positively reinforcing (pain attenuating) qualities, at least in the absence of external contingencies such as social reinforcement, and that such expressions may indeed be associated with higher levels of negative affect in response to similar nociceptive input.
PERSPECTIVE: This study demonstrates that making a standardized pain face increases negative affect in response to nociceptive stimulation, even in the absence of social feedback. This suggests that exaggerated facial displays of pain, although often socially reinforced, may also have unintended aversive consequences.
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