Research Publications

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.

Mindfulness meditation is a self-regulatory practice premised on sustaining non-reactive awareness of arising sensory events that reliably reduces pain. Yet, the specific analgesic mechanisms supporting mindfulness have not been comprehensively disentangled from the potential non-specific factors supporting this technique.

The primary aims of this Stage I pilot randomized controlled trial were to establish the feasibility of integrating exercise and nutrition counseling with Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE), a novel intervention that unites training in mindfulness, reappraisal, and savoring skills to target mechanisms underpinning appetitive dysregulation a pathogenic process that contributes to obesity among cancer survivors; to identify potential therapeutic mechanisms of the MORE intervention; and to obtain effect sizes to power a subsequent Stage II trial.