December Neuroscience Round-Up for Mindful Leaders

By the Mindful Leader Team

This week, we look at the promise of mindfulness meditation in treating anxiety and encouraging helping behavior, as well as why we tend to underestimate the value of our kindness towards others and what scientists have discovered about breathing and brain changes. Finally, we’ll tackle the big question that’s been on most of our minds lately: why does it feel like Christmas comes earlier each year? We have summarized the main ideas and key takeaways below with links to the full articles.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction works as well as a popular anxiety drug  

Over seven million Americans suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, and although it’s commonly treated with antidepressant medication, a new study suggests that mindfulness meditation might be just as effective in alleviating symptoms. 208 study participants were randomly divided and assigned to receive either treatment with the antidepressant escitalopram or with a weekly mindfulness-based stress intervention (MSBR) course. The MSBR course consisted of classes for 2 ½ hours each week plus 45 minutes of meditation homework daily. The anxiety levels of participants were assessed at baseline, 8-weeks, and at 12- and 24-month follow-up visits using the Clinical Global Impression of Severity scale (CGI-S). 

Key Points:

• Mindfulness-based stress intervention (MSBR) was equally as effective as the antidepressant escitalopram in treating anxiety over an 8-week period.
• 8% of participants stopped the antidepressant treatment due to adverse effects, but no participants dropped the MSBR treatment.
• While further studies are needed to determine if these effects continue over the long-term, these findings demonstrate that healthcare providers and insurance companies ought to consider mindfulness meditation as a viable treatment option for anxiety and other mental health conditions.

Read the full article here.

Study finds that even brief exposure to mindfulness meditation increases helping behavior   

Mindfulness has been shown to increase empathy and prosocial behaviors, including the willingness to help others. Researchers at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem set out to see if similar effects would emerge after only brief exposure to mindfulness meditation. Researchers recruited 189 participants with no prior experience with mindfulness and split them into three groups: a control group who would listen to two recorded lectures on empathy, a second control group who would listen to classical music, and the experimental group who would receive two 30-minute guided meditations. After ensuring dispositional empathy levels were similar across groups, researchers then measured participants’ empathetic response to a fictional story in which the main character, Anna, has a chronic illness and meets with unexpected misfortune. The participant pool was somewhat limited, all college students between the ages of 18 and 30 and mostly women.

Key Points:

• Those who engaged in two brief meditation practices were significantly more likely than either the classical music or lecture group to intend to help Anna and people in similar situations.
• Despite meditation increasing the intent to help others, it did not significantly increase their willingness to commit to volunteering or similar behaviors that would benefit others.
• Researchers also observed a correlation between dispositional empathy and desires to help Anna and others in similar situations. Those who scored higher on dispositional empathy also tended to score higher in measures of empathetic care for Anna.

Read the full article here.

Do You Underestimate the Impact of Being Kind?  

We often feel good after performing a random act of kindness for someone else, but we don’t necessarily consider just how good it makes the recipient feel. Two researchers at the University of Texas at Austin performed several experiments to better understand the psychology behind acts of kindness. In multiple experiments, people were given the opportunity to be kind to others, both strangers and people they already knew. For example, one study presented participants at an ice rink with a free hot cocoa but also gave them the choice to randomly give it away to someone else. In others, participants gave away cupcakes originally meant for them or surprised a classmate with a cup of coffee. Researchers also measured if people were more likely to give away money (in an economics game) after receiving a gift they picked out for themselves or receiving a random gift from a stranger. 

Key Points:

• In all these experiments, people who were kind to someone else (whether big or small, through action or a material gift, to a friend or stranger) largely underestimated just how much happier their act made the recipient feel. 
• Similarly, people also tended to underestimate the recipient’s desire to pay it forward. Participants who received a gift from a stranger as an act of kindness gave away more money in the economics game than those who picked out their own gift.
• Participants reported a greater feeling of happiness when offered kindness compared to receiving something for themselves or receiving something unexpected but not as an act of kindness.

Read the full article here. 

Breathing may measurably modulate neural responses across brain, study finds  

Researchers at Penn State University have identified a distinct respiration-related brain network driven by neural activity in rats. These findings suggest that breathing affects the fMRI signal by directly changing brain activity, which challenges the long-held belief that respiration is a non-neural physiological effect (similar to a heartbeat or other bodily movement) that gets measured in fMRIs. By combining fMRI and neuronal electrophysiology techniques, researchers were able to “silence” the noise associated with brain imaging (motion and carbon dioxide fluctuations) and focus solely on the neural activity associated with respiration.

Key Points:

• Within resting-state fMRI signals, i.e., imaging of brain activity at rest, respiration does not only cause physiological-related artifacts, such as carbon dioxide fluctuations, to emerge in the fMRI scan. There is also direct neural activity underpinning respiration that is reflected in these scans.
• Replicating a similar study in humans with the same techniques could reveal how meditation modulates neural activity in the human brain.

Read the full article here. 

Why We Feel Like Christmas Comes Around More Quickly Each Year

According to a study by Ruth Ogden and colleagues at The Conversation, 77% of respondents in the UK felt that Christmas seems to arrive quicker each year – but why might this be? After all, as kids, the month of December felt impossibly long, almost as though Christmas day would never arrive. Now, as adults, we blink and suddenly summer’s over, and the holidays are here. Additionally, a lot of the excitement is replaced with stress, which can make the build-up to the big day feel fast and stressful, rather than slow and anticipatory. While the retail industry has quite literally shifted the holiday season to begin much earlier, our psychology concerning time perception may be largely responsible for the feeling that Christmas arrives sooner and sooner each December.

Key Points:

• As we age, the passage of time is experienced differently. Christmases reflect a smaller proportion of our overall life experiences, which can make the time between them feel compressed.
• Our brain uses memory to estimate the duration of experiences, so as we settle into adult routines, the time between Christmas tends to feel shorter since it’s filled with less new memories.
• Paying less attention to time makes it pass more quickly. As Christmas gets less exciting with age, we tend to focus our time and energy on other things, until suddenly, Christmas is here.

Read the full article here.