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.

Although mindfulness has been linked with salutary clinical outcomes, less is known about its relation to cognitive mechanisms implicated in the onset and maintenance of alcohol dependence. Because trait mindfulness is associated with attentional control and emotion regulation, we hypothesized that trait mindfulness would be inversely associated with attentional bias towards visual alcohol cues.

Given that alcohol cue-reactivity can predict relapse, we evaluated cue-elicited high-frequency heart rate variability (HFHRV) and alcohol attentional bias (AB) as potential relapse risk indices.

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a prevalent functional disorder characterized by abdominal pain and hypervigilance to gastrointestinal sensations. We hypothesized that mindfulness training (MT), which promotes nonreactive awareness of emotional and sensory experience, may target underlying mechanisms of IBS including affective pain processing and catastrophic appraisals of gastrointestinal sensations.