6-Week student wellness program improves psychological wellbeing of students.

Objective: Employing a waitlist control design, the current study examined the effectiveness of a shortened version of a newly developed wellness program. Participants/Methods: Twenty-four students were randomly assigned to an experimental wellness (EW) group or a waitlist control (WLC) group. The 6-week wellness program focused on specific wellness topics (i.e., relaxation and mindfulness, yoga, gratitude and self-compassion, emotion regulation, goal setting and time management, and nutrition and movement). Both mental health and wellbeing outcomes were examined pre-post group. Results/Conclusions: Findings revealed that the EW group reported significantly improved overall psychological wellbeing, optimism, self-compassion, and satisfaction with life following the program relative to baseline, but the WLC group did not.

Student wellness: Interest and program ideas & pilot of a student wellness program.

Objective: To increase our knowledge related to student wellness programs, the current studies examined interest in wellness and wellness programs among university students and piloted a newly developed wellness program targeting students in higher education. Participants/Methods: In Study 1, 93 undergraduate students answered questions related to their wellness and mental health (e.g. psychological wellbeing, satisfaction with life, optimism, and stress) and to wellness programs (e.g. interest, barriers, duration, and topics). In Study 2, 13 undergraduate and graduate students participated in a 9-week pilot wellness program focused on specific wellness topics (e.g. relaxation, yoga, gratitude and self-compassion, and emotion regulation). Results/Conclusions: Study 1 results support a strong interest in wellness and wellness programs among undergraduate students. Study 2 results suggest that students who participated in an on-campus wellness program reported higher levels of overall psychological wellbeing and optimism and lower levels of mental health issues relative to baseline.

Establishment and replication of emotion regulation profiles: implications for psychological health.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: A promising method of capturing the complex nature of emotion regulation is to assess composite profiles of regulation (i.e., default pattern of regulation across multiple strategies). However, it remains unclear whether regulatory profiles demonstrate consistency across samples and in relation to mental health. DESIGN: Two studies are presented here. Both utilized a cross-sectional design, and the second study presents a replication of the first. METHOD: Both studies utilized self-report data from independent undergraduate samples to perform latent profile analyses of emotion regulation use. RESULTS: Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated evidence for four replicable regulatory profiles: Adaptive, Accepting (with or without Suppression), Non-accepting, and Maladaptive. Profiles were also related to symptoms of depression and anxiety, such that those consistently relying on adaptive strategies reported lower symptoms than those relying more heavily on maladaptive strategies. CONCLUSIONS: These findings clarify previous work which tied regulatory profiles to psychological health by extending a person-centered approach to understanding the ways in which individuals regulate their emotions.

Profiles of emotion regulation: Understanding regulatory patterns and the implications for posttraumatic stress.

Trauma survivors often experience posttraumatic stress (PTS) and report concurrent difficulties with emotion regulation (ER). Although individuals typically use multiple regulatory strategies to manage emotion, no studies yet examine the influence of a constellation of strategies on PTS in a community sample. We assessed six ER strategies and investigated whether specific profiles of ER (i.e. the typical pattern of regulation, determined by how often each strategy is used) were related to PTS. A hierarchical cluster analysis indicated that four distinct profiles were present: Adaptive Regulation, Active Regulation, Detached Regulation, and Maladaptive Regulation. Further analyses revealed that an individual's profile was not related to frequency of past trauma, but had the power to differentiate symptom severity for overall PTS and each symptom cluster of posttraumatic stress disorder. These findings highlight how profiles characterising multiple regulatory strategies offer a more complete understanding of the ways ER can account for PTS.

A Replication and Extension of the PEERS® for Young Adults Social Skills Intervention: Examining Effects on Social Skills and Social Anxiety in Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Young adults with ASD experience difficulties with social skills, empathy, loneliness, and social anxiety. One intervention, PEERS® for Young Adults, shows promise in addressing these challenges. The present study replicated and extended the original study by recruiting a larger sample (N = 56), employing a gold standard ASD assessment tool, and examining changes in social anxiety utilizing a randomized controlled trial design. Results indicated improvements in social responsiveness (SSIS-RS SS, p = .006 and CPB, p = .005; SRS, p = .004), PEERS® knowledge (TYASSK, p = .001), empathy (EQ, p = .044), direct interactions (QSQ-YA, p = .059), and social anxiety (LSAS-SR, p = .019). Findings demonstrate further empirical support for the intervention for individuals with ASD.

Brain mechanisms supporting the modulation of pain by mindfulness meditation.

The subjective experience of one's environment is constructed by interactions among sensory, cognitive, and affective processes. For centuries, meditation has been thought to influence such processes by enabling a nonevaluative representation of sensory events. To better understand how meditation influences the sensory experience, we used arterial spin labeling functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the neural mechanisms by which mindfulness meditation influences pain in healthy human participants. After 4 d of mindfulness meditation training, meditating in the presence of noxious stimulation significantly reduced pain unpleasantness by 57% and pain intensity ratings by 40% when compared to rest. A two-factor repeated-measures ANOVA was used to identify interactions between meditation and pain-related brain activation. Meditation reduced pain-related activation of the contralateral primary somatosensory cortex. Multiple regression analysis was used to identify brain regions associated with individual differences in the magnitude of meditation-related pain reductions. Meditation-induced reductions in pain intensity ratings were associated with increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, areas involved in the cognitive regulation of nociceptive processing. Reductions in pain unpleasantness ratings were associated with orbitofrontal cortex activation, an area implicated in reframing the contextual evaluation of sensory events. Moreover, reductions in pain unpleasantness also were associated with thalamic deactivation, which may reflect a limbic gating mechanism involved in modifying interactions between afferent input and executive-order brain areas. Together, these data indicate that meditation engages multiple brain mechanisms that alter the construction of the subjectively available pain experience from afferent information.

Effects of brief and sham mindfulness meditation on mood and cardiovascular variables.

OBJECTIVES: Although long-term meditation has been found to reduce negative mood and cardiovascular variables, the effects of a brief mindfulness meditation intervention when compared to a sham mindfulness meditation intervention are relatively unknown. This experiment examined whether a 3-day (1-hour total) mindfulness or sham mindfulness meditation intervention would improve mood and cardiovascular variables when compared to a control group. METHODS: Eighty-two (82) undergraduate students (34 males, 48 females), with no prior meditation experience, participated in three sessions that involved training in either mindfulness meditation, sham mindfulness meditation, or a control group. Heart rate, blood pressure, and psychologic variables (Profile of Mood States, State Anxiety Inventory) were assessed before and after the intervention. RESULTS: The meditation intervention was more effective at reducing negative mood, depression, fatigue, confusion, and heart rate, when compared to the sham and control groups. CONCLUSIONS: These results indicate that brief meditation training has beneficial effects on mood and cardiovascular variables that go beyond the demand characteristics of a sham meditation intervention.

The effects of brief mindfulness meditation training on experimentally induced pain.

UNLABELLED: This study investigated the effects of brief mindfulness meditation training on ratings of painful electrical stimulation. In Experiment 1, we used a 3-day (20 min/d) mindfulness meditation intervention and measured pain ratings before and after the intervention. Participants' numerical ratings of pain to "low" and "high" electrical stimulation significantly decreased after meditation training. Pain sensitivity, measured by change in stimulus intensity thresholds, also decreased after training. We investigated, in Experiment 2, how well relaxation and a math distraction task attenuated experimental pain. Math distraction but not relaxation reduced high pain ratings. There was no reduction in pain sensitivity in these participants. In Experiment 3, we directly compared the effects of meditation with math distraction and relaxation conditions. Our findings indicated significant effects of both meditation and math distraction. Consistent with what was observed in Experiment 1, these participants also demonstrated a decrease in pain sensitivity after meditation training. Changes in the mindfulness and anxiety assessments suggest that meditation's analgesic effects are related to reduced anxiety and the enhanced ability to focus on the present moment. PERSPECTIVE: Our findings indicate that a brief 3-day mindfulness meditation intervention was effective at reducing pain ratings and anxiety scores when compared with baseline testing and other cognitive manipulations. The brief meditation training was also effective at increasing mindfulness skills.

Right-lateralized pain processing in the human cortex: an FMRI study.

Neuroimaging studies of human pain have revealed a widespread "pain matrix" distributed across both hemispheres of the brain. It is not resolved whether the pain matrix is biased toward one hemisphere, although behavioral and clinical data suggest that pain is perceived differently on the two sides of the body, and several neuroimaging studies suggest that pain processing in some regions of cortex may be lateralized toward the right hemisphere. The current study used fMRI in nine subjects to determine whether acute pain is preferentially processed in one cortical hemisphere. All cortical areas that were activated during the painful simulation were investigated, and several analytic approaches were used to directly compare activated regions to similar regions in the opposite hemisphere. Results indicated that four regions of the cortical pain matrix were activated either contralaterally (somatosensory cortex) or bilaterally (mid/posterior insula, anterior insula, and posterior cingulate). In addition, activation in five cortical regions during acute pain stimulation was localized either exclusively in the right hemisphere or was strongly lateralized to the right. These five areas were in the middle frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate, inferior frontal gyrus, medial/superior frontal gyri, and inferior parietal lobule. The location of some of these regions is consistent with the idea that there may be a right-lateralized attentional system to alert an organism to an infrequent, but behaviorally relevant, stimulus such as pain.

Socially-induced brain 'fertilization': play promotes brain derived neurotrophic factor transcription in the amygdala and dorsolateral frontal cortex in juvenile rats.

Rough and tumble (R&T) play is assumed to have beneficial effects in developing organisms. To evaluate this idea, brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene expression was evaluated in 32-day-old juvenile rats that were allowed to play for 30 min prior to sacrifice. In situ hybridization for BDNF mRNA revealed that the amygdala and dorsolateral frontal cortex had significantly elevated BDNF mRNA expression as a result of play. These effects suggest that play may help program higher brain regions involved in emotional behaviors.

Expression of c-fos gene activation during rough and tumble play in juvenile rats.

Rough and tumble (R&T) play is an intrinsic behavior in most mammals. However, unlike sex and aggression, play has not been well characterized in terms of neuronal circuitry. We employed in situ hybridization to explore the differences of c-fos mRNA activation in juvenile rats that had been allowed R&T play for a total of 30 min before sacrifice contrasted to animals with comparable histories that had received no play. Densitometric estimates of c-fos gene activation revealed that the deep and dorsolateral tectum, inferior colliculus, dorsal periaquaductal gray, ventromedial hypothalamus, dorsal and ventral striatum, and somatosensory cortex were significantly more activated in animals that had played than those that had not. Prior play dominance and amount of social experience had no clear effects on the levels of c-fos gene expression. This provides a variety of new hypotheses concerning the role of various brain areas in the elaboration of R&T play behavior, but the important role of other types of motor arousal in the differential effects were not evaluated in this study.