The Mindfulness Science and Practice Cluster at Washington University in St. Louis, with funding from the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures, offered small grants of up to $5,000 to support mindfulness research in a wide range of disciplines.
Project: Using Mindfulness as a Tool for Living with Chronic Pain: A Pilot Group Class Approach
Kerri Sharp Rawson, PhD
Assistant Professor of Physical Therapy and Neurology
Chronic pain affects approximately 30% of the U.S. population and impacts quality of life, the ability to work, personal relationships, daily mood, and financial stress. Chronic pain may also lead to addiction issues. Managing pain effectively is a complex process that is best achieved by targeting biological, cognitive, emotional, behavioral, social, and environmental factors. Mindfulness training and practice as an intervention shows promise as part of pain management strategies and has been shown to enhance quality of life.
In collaboration with two mindfulness instructors, Katie Bucklen and Jeanne Kloeckner, this project evaluates a newly developed mindfulness course that draws widely from established mindfulness programs. Participants engage in mindfulness practice and are taught about the biopsychosocial model of pain and how thoughts, beliefs, emotions and behaviors influence how our bodies respond. This course on mindfulness for chronic pain aligns with the Mindfulness Science & Practice Community’s mission by testing the feasibility of a newly created mindfulness intervention and evaluating its psychological, motor and psychosocial impacts, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of how mindfulness can be applied and integrated effectively within a community setting.
Project: Exploring the Epistemology of Memory in Exile and Its Relation to Land Through Art/Film.
Tsering Wangmo
Doctoral Student, Anthropology
This project supports the production of a short film to be shot in Ladakh, India. In both form and content, the film explores the temporality and “embodiment” of land in bodies through memories, particularly delving into the possibilities of the “physicality” of memory. The transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary frameworks and methods from anthropology, filmmaking, and film studies in this project directly tie in with the objectives of the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures Cluster. The political lives of the characters in this film reflect a subtle understanding of religious and historical contexts from which important discourses and teachings of mindfulness emerged in the “West”.
As a filmmaker and creative researcher interested in embodied research practices, “being aware” is one of the consciously driven forces crucial to how I analyze, critique, and produce epistemology and stories. This project aims to situate multi-modal methods of argumentation and knowledge-seeking relating to the topics of memory, narratives, and representations into academic discourses while recognizing and bringing to the forefront the people and places that inspire new insights. In this creative pursuit for knowledge, the people are Tibetan exiles in India, and the places: Tibet and India.
Project: An Emotional Support Intervention to Improve Educator Well-Being, Increase Mindfulness, and Change How Teachers Communicate About Stress to Students
Maegan Arney
Doctoral Student, Education
Educators have stressful jobs and experienced widespread burnout and a decline in their overall well-being during the pandemic. They also serve as key emotional supports for students who often come to them with their emotional difficulties and stressful life situations. Many educators have noticed that students are even more likely to experience and need support for their emotions and mental health since the pandemic began. Therefore, additional emotional supports for educators are both well-timed and relevant.
The proposed study will test a newly developed emotional support intervention for teachers. The intervention will provide a toolkit of effective emotion management strategies and different ways people think about their emotions, including how to utilize mindfulness personally and how to be more mindful with their students. Evidence from this study will help us learn about intervention efficacy and gather feedback from teachers about the intervention materials with an aim of improving the content based on that feedback.
Project: Looped Soundscapes: Composing and Creating Harp Music for Use in Mindfulness Settings and Research
Lisa Gilbert, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer, Department of Education
Sound can be a powerful anchor for meditation. Yet the resources available to both researchers and musicians are often constrained: researchers need a stable set of compositions and recordings that meet certain criteria, and musicians often search for advice beyond playing old favorites or improvising. This transdisciplinary, artistic work will contribute to our broader community via the composition of repetitive loops conducive to meditative states, both written and recorded, all ultimately made freely available to researchers and therapeutic musicians alike.
Throughout the project, consultations with disciplinary specialists in music, neuroscience, and religious studies will allow for the identification of best practices and emergent questions. The Mindfulness Cluster’s anti-bias values will further guide the pursuit of a path characterized by respect for religious traditions and cultural values embedded in chant and other longstanding uses of sound for meditation.
An update from Dr. Gilbert: “This grant allowed me to embark on a profound journey. At the end of an intense period of exploration, I created a set of compositions with gentle tones that pulse in and out of synchronicity. The recordings are nearly identical, with only the frequencies changed to serve as an independent variable. If you’d like to use this music for your own meditation practice, the tracks will be posted below soon with free unlimited streaming. If you’re a researcher and would like to use them in your work, please get in touch with me directly – I’d love to connect!”
Project: Understanding the Effect of Focused Attention and Open Monitoring Meditation on Attentional and Cognitive Control in Anxiety
Resh Gupta, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent and one of the leading causes of disease burden worldwide. Research in the field of cognitive neuroscience has focused on understanding the neural mechanisms that may account for anxiety symptoms; for example, many studies and theories have pointed to the importance of general attentional and cognitive control deficits associated with anxiety. In parallel, a large body of research has demonstrated the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) in the treatment of anxiety, and it has been proposed that mindfulness meditation exerts its effects through improvements in attentional and cognitive control.
The proposed project will utilize EEG combined with a novel “state induction” design to compare two types of mindfulness practices – focused attention (FA) and open monitoring (OM) – in terms of their potentially distinct effects on neural activity and behavioral performance in a well-established experimental task assessing attention and cognitive control. A key hypothesis to be tested is whether mindfulness-related effects on anxiety symptoms are mediated by changes in neurobehavioral markers of attentional and cognitive control.