This project will set the foundation for accelerating mindfulness research through interdisciplinary collaborations, open science and a common theoretical background.
Over the past four decades, research has shown that mindfulness can benefit mental and physical well-being. However, much of the evidence comes from relatively small studies conducted across different disciplines. Bringing researchers and existing data together can help build a more comprehensive understanding of mindfulness and its effects.
This project has three main objectives:
- Build the Mindfulness Consortium: an international, interdisciplinary network of mindfulness researchers.
- Create an open-science database that enables researchers to share and pool data from existing mindfulness studies.
- Investigate long-term mindfulness meditation through an empirical study examining its effects and underlying mechanisms.
Funded by the Varela Grant from the Mind & Life Institute.
Mindfulness interventions seem to be able to counteract the effects of chronic stress, and to protect mental and physical health, but the underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood.
This fellowship aims to test and further develop an interdisciplinary framework (INSPIRER) that integrates psychological, neural, genomic and immune mechanisms of mindfulness interventions.
Chronic stress can have harmful effects on both mental and physical health. One important biological pathway is low-grade systemic inflammation, which has been linked to conditions such as depression, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, and neurodegenerative disorders.
Mindfulness-based interventions may help reduce the effects of chronic stress, but the mechanisms behind these benefits are still not fully understood. Existing findings are also spread across different disciplines, making it difficult to see how psychological, neural, and immune processes work together.
This EU-funded project (INSPIRER) was developed to address this gap. It integrates psychological, neural, genomic, and immune mechanisms into a single interdisciplinary framework for understanding how mindfulness may increase resilience to stress.
The project has three main objectives:
- Review and integrate existing evidence on the mechanisms through which mindfulness may influence stress and health.
- Compare long-term meditators with non-meditators on psychological, neural, and immune measures, including their responses to experimentally induced stress.
- Test an 8-week mindfulness intervention in a randomised controlled trial and examine its effects on the same psychological, neural, and immune outcomes.
The project combines methods from psychology, neuroscience, and immunology, including questionnaires, structural and functional MRI, and inflammatory biomarkers. By bringing these different levels of analysis together, INSPIRER can provide a more complete understanding of how mindfulness works and how it may help protect against the effects of chronic stress.
Previous research
Individual differences in meditation interventions
Why do some people benefit more from mindfulness or other meditation interventions?
This meta-analytic study investigates the relationship between baseline participant characteristics and the outcomes of meditation.
More about this topic can be found in a book chapter in Oxford Handbook of Meditation)
Mind-body techniques and gene expression
What Is the Molecular Signature of Mind–Body Interventions? A Systematic Review of Gene Expression Changes Induced by Meditation and Related Practices
This study compared gene expression changes following different mind-body interventions and found that all of them can downregulate the activity of genes related to inflammation, which in turn reduces our risk for health problems.
Mindfulness and yoga in prison
Want to know more?
For more research and up-to-date list of publications, visit my Google Scholar profile: