Research Publications

Pain is a biopsychosocial experience that goes well beyond mere nociception. In this regard, identification of the physical pathology at the site of injury is necessary but not sufficient to explicate the complex process by which somatosensory information is transformed into the physiologic, cognitive, affective, and behavioral response labeled as pain.

Both acute and chronic pain can disrupt reward processing. Moreover, prolonged prescription opioid use and depressed mood are common in chronic pain samples. Despite the prevalence of these risk factors for anhedonia, little is known about anhedonia in chronic pain populations. We conducted a large-scale, systematic study of anhedonia in chronic pain, focusing on its relationship with opioid use/misuse, pain severity, and depression.

This study demonstrates that female patients with opioid-treated chronic pain who have extensive ACE histories suffer from emotion dysregulation and cue-elicited craving.

In 2006, Eric Garland began to contemplate developing a mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) for the treatment of addiction. At the time, there were no empirically supported mindfulness-based treatments for addiction, and few studies of mindfulness for addictive behavior had been published.

The Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory (MMT) is a temporally dynamic process model of mindful positive emotion regulation that elucidates downstream cognitive-affective mechanisms by which mindfulness promotes health and resilience. Here we review and extend the MMT to explicate how mindfulness fosters self-transcendence by evoking upward spirals of decentering, attentional broadening, reappraisal, and savoring.