Open research questions in Mindfulness and Compassion Interventions

What the literature leaves open

• Mindfulness-based interventions have demonstrated efficacy in improving mood and coping ability in patients with various chronic illnesses; however, their specific impact on the dual burden of depression and walking ability in patients with LEAOD remains unclear.

  Impact of mindfulness training on depression and walking ability in patients with lower extremity arteriosclerosis obliterans and depression · 2026 · DOI

• Future research should consider larger multicenter datasets, randomized controlled study designs, more diverse participant populations, longer follow-up periods for adherence monitor- ing, and the incorporation of physiological signals and more sophisticated explainable artificial intelligence (AI) frameworks to enhance the robustness, interpretability, and generalizability of automated systems for the detection of stress.

  A Machine Learning Framework for Automated Detection of Perceived Stress in Female Students · 2026 · DOI

• Although mindfulness-based interventions have demonstrated promising effects in reducing psychological distress and improving self-management among individuals with T2DM, most existing evidence originates from high-income settings, with limited evidence regarding feasibility and implementation in resource-constrained healthcare systems.

  Feasibility and Preliminary Effectiveness of a Nurse-Led Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Intervention on Diabetes Distress, Coping, and Glycemic Control among Adults with Type 2 Diabetes: A Study Protocol · 2026 · DOI

• All participants completed the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) and practitioners the Meditation Depth Questionnaire (MEDEQ) as well as open questions regarding their meditation practice.

  Mindfulness and Metacognitive Monitoring Accuracy in Young Meditation Practitioners Compared to Non-Practitioners · 2026 · DOI

• Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) support health outcomes in people with cardiovascular disease (CVD) but have not been evaluated among people with HIV (PWH) at risk for CVD.

  Mindfulness practices for cardiovascular disease risk reduction among people with HIV: A qualitative study of perceived feasibility and acceptability · 2026 · DOI

• Nevertheless, future studies should examine whether treatment response differs by trauma type, trauma chronicity, sex, medication use, baseline severity, and intervention adherence. First, the follow-up period was limited to 12 weeks, so the durability of treatment effects beyond short-term follow-up remains uncertain.

  <b>Efficacy of Mindfulness-Based Interventions for Treating Anxiety in PTSD Patients</b> · 2026 · DOI

• improvement for students, it appears the Physical Education class students were worse off overall at the end of the study. The data continue to support the inclusion of Yoga as a form of physical exercise for improving the health of students within the demographics of those who participated in the study. As with any study, limitations factor in and should be identified. This study was limited by the sample size made available to researchers, and the results are generalizable only to the convenience sample population that was afforded to researchers by school district guidelines. Future studies should focus on larger, randomly sampled populations that reflect different schools and regions. The results of this study were positive; precautions should be used in their generalization. The long-term permanence of the results must also be confirmed with follow-up studies. The results of this study demonstrate promising improvements in the mental health and well-being of students engaged in mindfulness yoga practices at school. A school-based yoga program is an innovative approach that supports and cultivates mental skills and socioemotional dispositions in preparing and educating future generations and should be considered a viable option for a traditional PE curriculum due to the potential added benefits.

  Comparative Effects of School-Based Yoga and Physical Education on Psychological Well-Being of At-Risk Hispanic Adolescents After COVID-19 · 2026 · DOI

• Accumulating evidence suggests alterations in neurocognitive, affective, interoceptive and autonomic processing in functional neurological disorder (FND), yet interventions targeting these processes remain underexplored.

  Somatic yoga therapy for functional neurological disorder: An experimental pilot study examining cognitive and affective mechanisms · 2026 · DOI

• their mindfulness Several limitations should be considered for this study. One limitation of this study is the potential influence of survey sequencing, as participants responded to perception-based questions about war- affected refugee children prior to completing the MAAS. The emotionally charged nature of these questions may have affected participants’ cognitive and emotional states, potentially responses. Another influencing limitation of this study is the pronounced ceiling effect observed for the item “Does war affect children negatively,” with nearly all participants endorsing this statement. This restricted variability may have reduced the sensitivity of correlational analyses involving this variable. Additionally, the cross-sectional design limits the ability to draw causal inferences about students’ attitudes and behaviors toward war-affected populations. Longitudinal or interventionbased research is recommended to examine whether mindfulness influences students’ professional attitudes or actions over time. Another limitation concerns the sample characteristics. The study was conducted with undergraduate students from the Faculty of Health Sciences at a public university located in western Türkiye. Therefore, the findings may not be generalizable to students from other disciplines, regions, or cultural contexts. Future research should include more diverse and representative samples to increase the external validity of the results. Moreover, all the data were collected via self-report instruments, which may be susceptible to social desirability bias and subjective interpretation, potentially limiting the accuracy of the findings. The study also did not assess whether participants had prior experience or training in mindfulness practices, which may have influenced their MAAS scores independently of their academic or personal characteristics. Finally, students’ perceptions of war-affected children may have been shaped by cultural norms, political views, or media exposure—factors that were not controlled for in this study. These contextual influences should be considered in future research to better understand the social and cognitive determinants of attitudes toward vulnerable populations. Mindfulness Toward War-Affected Refugee ChildrenAcıbadem Univ. Sağlık Bilim. Derg.

  Mindfulness and Perceptions of Undergraduate Healthcare Students Toward War-Affected Refugee Children: A Cross-Sectional Study · 2026 · DOI

• reintegration, the physical, psychological, and social impacts of war, adequacy of aid, access to healthcare, and perceived economic or cultural threats. An item pool was initially generated from the literature (9, 16, 19), and content validity was established through review by five pediatric nursing experts with over ten years of professional experience and publications in social pediatrics. Using a four-point relevance scale (1= not relevant to 4= highly relevant), item-level Content Validity Index (CVI) ranged from 0.98 to 1.00, and the scale-level CVI was 0.98, indicating excellent content validity. Minor wording revisions were made in response to expert feedback. A pilot test with 30 undergraduate healthcare students not included in the main sample was then conducted to assess clarity and comprehensibility, and no items required removal or substantial modification. • Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS): Developed by Brown and Ryan (2003), the MAAS is a 15-item, single-factor scale designed to assess individuals’ general tendency to be attentive to and aware of present-moment experiences in daily life (12). It is a 6-point Likert- type scale ranging from 1 (almost never) to 6 (almost always), with total scores ranging from 15 to 90. Higher scores indicate greater levels of mindfulness. The MAAS does not have a validated cutoff score; therefore, scores are interpreted on a relative scale rather than in categorical classifications. The original version of the scale had an internal consistency coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) of 0.82. The Turkish adaptation, conducted by Özyeşil et al. (2011), reported a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.80 (20). In the present study, Cronbach’s alpha was calculated as 0.87. Aydın Bahise et al.Acıbadem Univ. Sağlık Bilim. Derg. 2026 Data Collection Data collection was carried out face-to-face by the researchers, with participants who voluntarily agreed to take part in the study. The participants were asked to complete the data collection forms in person within the faculty building. They were also asked to sign the informed consent form provided and to answer all the questions completely. This process took approximately 15-20 minutes.

  Mindfulness and Perceptions of Undergraduate Healthcare Students Toward War-Affected Refugee Children: A Cross-Sectional Study · 2026 · DOI

• The following limitations of this study must be mentioned, which help inform fruitful areas for future research to pursue. First, given the small sample size and lack of a control group, these preliminary findings should be interpreted with caution. Further research employing larger, randomized controlled trials is warranted to substantiate and generalize these effects. Future investigations could also incorporate longitudinal follow-ups and additional physiological and psychological measures to deepen understanding of the reported improvements. Other areas of consideration are around professional training and guidance. This would be a limitation, as proper training is essential to ensure safe and effective practices, particularly for bilateral stimulation and hypnotherapy, where there is a potential to harm others if not performed by a skilled and trained professional. Furthermore, integrating practice knowledge into experience within the IDEA framework is complex, requiring the practitioner to manage multiple modalities and develop the skills necessary to act ethically and avoid harm to others.

  Evaluating the IDEA Framework: An Integrative Approach to Enhancing Well-Being via Yoga, Meditation, Bilateral Stimulation, and Hypnotherapy · 2026 · DOI

• future research may benefit Building on the evidence and ideas assembled in this Research Topic, from several directions: longitudinal designs to test durability of effects; cross-cultural comparisons to clarify cultural boundary conditions; mixed- methods approaches to connect mechanisms with lived experience; and design-oriented research examining how platform features and algorithmic architectures can support (or undermine) mindful engagement.

  Editorial: Applications of mindfulness in media and communication studies · 2026 · DOI

• Post hoc analyses indicated that 196 participants (98 dyads) were needed at 80% power, inflating Type I and Type II errors (Shreffler & Huecker, 2022). Only 35% of dyads attended their sessions, inflating the risk of selection bias. Future studies may improve enrollment by using large-group Race and Social Problems (2026) 18:30 Page 11 of 13 30 formats that pair participants into dyads on-site (Bruneau & Saxe, 2012). Reliance on self-report measures also raises concerns about social desirability, though there was no evi- dence of ceiling effects and outcome variability was signifi- cant across partners. Another limitation involved unequal intervention durations, with inactive control shorter than mindfulness and relaxation instructions, potentially affect- ing engagement and cognitive load. The sample consisted of college students who could plausibly encounter one another outside the laboratory. Although prior acquaintances were screened, participants were likely aware of this possibility. Gender matching was not implemented due to scheduling constraints, introducing another salient social identity that may have influenced inter- actions. While the study prioritized naturalistic intergroup exchange, the interaction was highly structured, yielding high experimental realism but limited mundane realism. Typed responses and explicit speech constraints may have dampened emotional expression and empathic responding.

  Does Brief Mindfulness Instruction Improve Intergroup Attitudes in an Interethnic Dyadic Perspective-giving and Perspective-taking Interaction? · 2026 · DOI

• Several limitations should be acknowledged. First, there is no universally agreed definition of yoga; the term is used to describe a wide range of diverse practices, which poses real difficulties for implementation in classroom settings and for comparing experiences across teachers and programmes. In this paper, yoga has been described as an adapted, child- friendly practice combining simple postures, breathing, and relaxation delivered through storytelling, but readers should 1 3Early Childhood Education Journal bear in mind that other practitioners may use the term dif- ferently. Second, there is evidence that physical activities, including yoga, can be perceived as “gendered”, and some teaching staff may hold assumptions about boys’ and girls’ engagement with yoga activities that shape participation (Wilkin et al. 2026a, b). Although I tried to invite all chil- dren equally and to present poses in gender-neutral terms, gendered patterns of engagement may still have operated in ways that were not visible to me at the time. Third, there are well-documented barriers to teachers’ incorporation of movement and yoga into their daily practice, including time pressures, curriculum demands, limited training, and con- fidence (Wilkin et al., 2025). My own situation as a chil- dren’s yoga teacher in training, with a movement-education background is not representative of the typical early child- hood teacher, and the strategies described here may need additional support, planning time, or professional learning before they can be adopted in other classrooms. Finally, no formal evaluation or systematic feedback was collected from the children at the end of each session. Although chil- dren spontaneously shared comments, drawings, and pose suggestions throughout the series, I did not use a structured tool to capture their views on the activities. As a result, my account of how children experienced the sessions reflects my own observations and interpretations as a practitioner- researcher, rather than the children’s evaluations in their own words, and future iterations of this work would benefit from including children’s voices in a more systematic way. Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions. The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

  Yoga Storytelling as an Active Learning Approach: Insights from Early Childhood Classroom Practice · 2026 · DOI

• We also compared the effect of aging and gender on a different dataset of healthy middle-aged (N=78) and elderly (N=89) participants and found differences in distinct frequency bands that were limited to a narrow range.

  Open-eyed meditation suppresses functional connectivity in EEG across a broad frequency range · 2026 · DOI

• The study has some limitations. First, the intervention effects are based only on short-term (pre-test-post-test) measurements. The lack of long-term follow-up data lim- its inferences about the sustainability of the MBSR pro- gram’s effects. Future studies are recommended to evaluate the medium- and long-term effects of the intervention with follow-up measurements. 1 3A. Akbeniz, E. Sabancı Baransel Second, the fact that the intervention was conducted online may have had a limiting effect on group interaction, therapeutic bonding, and application intensity compared to face-to-face applications. Therefore, direct generalization of the findings to face-to-face MBSR programs should be considered with caution. Another limitation of this study is the lack of blinding of participants and intervention providers due to the nature of the MBSR program. In addition, all outcome measures were based on self-reported instruments. Therefore, expectancy effects, reporting bias, positive intervention expectations, and social desirability bias may have contributed to an over- estimation of the intervention effects. Furthermore, the absence of an active control group lim- its the ability to distinguish the specific effects of the MBSR intervention from non-specific factors such as attention and participation effects. The retrospective registration of the trial represents a methodological limitation. Although the study protocol, outcome measures, and statistical analysis plan were final- ized before participant recruitment began, retrospective reg- istration may reduce transparency and should therefore be interpreted with caution. The fact that the sample consisted of women with PMS severity above a certain threshold (PMSS ≥ 110) who volun- tarily participated in the study may limit the generalizability of the findings to women with milder PMS symptoms or to different sociocultural contexts. In addition, PMS eligibility was determined using a single self-report PMSS assessment rather than prospective menstrual cycle monitoring. Since PMS symptoms may fluctuate across menstrual cycles, this approach may have increased the risk of misclassification. Therefore, the findings should be interpreted with cau- tion. Future studies are recommended to include prospec- tive cycle-based assessments and daily symptom diaries to improve diagnostic accuracy. Although several reproductive and clinical variables were controlled through the inclusion and exclusion cri- teria, some potentially important factors such as detailed menstrual symptom characteristics, subclinical psychologi- cal symptoms, and individual differences in coping styles may still have influenced fear of childbirth, psychological well-being, and responsiveness to the MBSR intervention.

  The effect of mindfulness-based stress reduction training on fear of childbirth and psychological well-being in women experiencing premenstrual syndrome: a randomized controlled trial · 2026 · DOI

• Priorities include: (1) longitudinal and experimental designs to confirm mediation over time and under interven- tion; (2) multi-site Indian cohorts to test generalizability; (3) integration of objective/behavioral indices (task-based inhibition, physiological arousal) and clinically salient out- comes (burnout via MBI, errors, patient-rated empathy); (4) moderation tests (gender, specialty, substance use) to tailor interventions; and (5) implementation studies comparing MSC, MBSR, and ACT-informed modules in residency cur- ricula for feasibility, adherence, and sustained effects.

  Self-Compassion as a Buffer of Stress and Predictor of Emotion Regulation Among Indian Postgraduate Medical Trainees: A Cross-Sectional Study. · 2026 · DOI

• Executives differ in personality, role demands, and organisational conditions. The effectiveness of individual modules varies. The programme presupposes self-discipline; those with weaker self-structuring may require accompanying coaching. A full empirical validation of the programme as a whole remains pending, although the psychological mechanisms of the single modules are well documented. Organisational conditions — communication culture, workload — influence implementation. Short-term improvements are plausible; sustained change requires continuous application.

  Stoic Lifestyle Intervention for Executive Stress Management: Structure, Daily Practice, and Evaluation Approaches · 2026 · DOI

• The sample size of 50, while adequate for detecting large effect sizes, limits power for subgroup analyses. Single- site recruitment in Kerala may constrain generalisability. Physiological assessments were limited to non-invasive markers; future studies should incorporate biochemical indices such as serum cortisol, inflammatory cytokines (IL-6, TNF-α), and formal heart rate variability analysis to elucidate mechanistic pathways. Blinding of participants to group allocation was not possible given the nature of the intervention. Long-term follow-up data beyond 12 weeks were not obtained.

  Effect Of Nadi Shuddhi Pranayama On Anxiety, Stress, Depression, Quality Of Life, And Physiological Markers In Breast Cancer Patients: A Randomised Controlled Trial · 2026 · DOI

• 3 Limitations This study is not without limitations, which should be acknowl- edged when interpreting the findings. engagement within cognitive Finally, the study did not account for potential moderating influ- ences such as gender differences, type of sport, or socioeconomic background, which may further nuance the observed relationships. Third, the sample was limited to adolescent athletes in China, which, while offering cultural and contextual insight, may restrict the generalizability of findings to other populations or cultural contexts where media use patterns, athletic structures, and body ideals differ.

  Investigating the relationship between social media exposure, body image dissatisfaction, and self-compassion in adolescent athlete · 2026 · DOI

• Establish consistent routines while adapting instruction to varied ability levels in order to maintain attention and encourage regular 1 participation. Adapt delivery to rural contexts by ensuring availability of basic facilities, using locally understandable language, respecting cultural norms, simplifying terminology, and responding sensitively to 2 adolescents’ physical and emotional needs. Build supportive relationships with adolescents, interact beyond formal sessions where feasible, tailor practices to individual capacities, involve local support when possible, and include activities 3 that strengthen confidence and ownership. Integrate yoga into school routines by emphasizing its contribution to holistic development, stress reduction, improved concentration, and readiness to learn, including feasible daily practices such as Sūrya Namaskāra. Encourage sustained participation by clearly communicating the purpose and benefits of practices, creating engaging sessions, and fostering inclusive, non-judgmental group environments. Prefer morning sessions where possible and allow flexible duration, beginning around 30 min and gradually extending toward 45– 60 min as interest and capacity increase. Select safe and age-appropriate postures such as Sūrya Namaskāra, Vṛkṣāsana, Bhujaṅgāsana, Pādahastāsana, and Trikoṇāsana within structured sequences. Include breath regulation, relaxation, and meditation practices— including forms of prāṇāyāma and guided relaxation (Yoga Nidrā, Śavāsana etc)—to support emotional balance and reduce aggression- related responses. Progress gradually, prevent injury, and protect emotional well-being by avoiding excessive intensity or unhealthy competition, and by providing clear, supportive, and sequential instruction. 4 5 6 7 8 9 highlighted the feasibility and acceptability of school-based mind– body programs in supporting youth mental health and behavioral functioning (41–43). However, much of the existing literature focuses primarily on evaluating intervention outcomes rather than describing how yoga sessions should be structured and delivered in diverse edu- cational or community settings. Standardized practice frameworks, such as the CYP developed by the Ministry of AYUSH (27), provide structured sequences of āsanās, prāṇāyāma, meditation and relaxation techniques for public dissemi- nation. Similarly, professional bodies including the International Association of Yoga Therapists (28) and Yoga Alliance (29) define training standards and competency frameworks for instructors. While these frameworks support standardization of practice and instructor preparation, they offer limited guidance on adapting yoga delivery to adolescent developmental characteristics, mixed-ability groups, or rural implementation constraints. Guidelines developed by institu- tions under the Ministry of AYUSH, such as the Morarji Desai National Institute of Yoga, highlight age-appropriate, non-competi- tive, and safety-oriented approaches to teaching yoga among adoles- cents. These guidelines emphasize adapting practices to developmental needs and group contexts. The practitioner-informed insights from the present study are consistent with these principles, particularly in sessions.

  A practitioner-informed framework for yoga-based emotional regulation among rural adolescents · 2026 · DOI

• The practitioner-informed recommendations were derived through systematic mapping of themes to implementation-relevant domains. The themes identified in the analysis informed recommendations for delivering yoga sessions to adolescents in group settings. These recommendations reflect trainers’ experiences related to adolescent developmental characteristics, rural contextual challenges, instructional approaches, and the selection of appropriate yoga practices. The resulting recommendations are presented in Table 3. In addition to these recommendations, several operational requirements were identified to support the safe implementation of yoga sessions with adolescents. These include informed consent procedures, trainer preparedness, supervision, environmental safety, and basic practice conditions. The operational requirements are summarized in Table 4.

  A practitioner-informed framework for yoga-based emotional regulation among rural adolescents · 2026 · DOI

• To analyze the consequences of the institutional response plan, international legal mechanisms, international courts’ proposals, and treaty bodies’ responsibilities in accelerating accountability and mitigating violations 4.

  Effect of Super Brain Yoga on Academic Performance among Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Middle and Late Childhood · 2026 · DOI

• Future studies ought to focus on rigorously structured RCTs with active control groups to conclusively demonstrate that pranayama is an effective practice. Comparisons of various pranayama methods (e.g., HFYB vs. LFYB) and time periods should be conducted through studies to determine the best protocols. A critical priority is the standardization of intervention protocols, including specifying the exact sequence and duration of each pranayama technique, frequency and intensity of practice, instructor qualifications, and procedures for monitoring adherence, as the substantial variability observed across included studies in techniques, session durations, and total periods limited comparability and synthesis. Similarly, 2026 Thind et al. Cureus 18(5): e109256. DOI 10.7759/cureus.109256 13 of 15 standardization of outcome measures is urgently needed; future research should prioritize the use of widely accepted, validated instruments such as the PSS-10 and STAI-S to facilitate meta-analytic synthesis and reduce statistical heterogeneity. The biological basis of these interventions, including alterations in HRV, cortisol, and neural correlates, could be better understood by investigating the underlying biological processes. Longitudinal research is required to establish how the benefits can be sustained and integrated into medical students' long-term lifestyles. Additionally, more studies are needed on implementation science strategies for integrating viable, scalable pranayama programs across medical schools worldwide. Finally, future studies should adhere to reporting guidelines such as CONSORT, with complete reporting of means, SDs, and pre-post correlations to enable accurate meta-analysis.

  Aggregate Effects of Yoga-Based Volitional Breathing Interventions on Perceived Stress and Anxiety Levels Among Medical Students Worldwide: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis · 2026 · DOI

• The proof-of-concept nature of this study necessitates consideration of its limitations, which in turn point to potentially important future directions. First, the findings are based on a relatively modest sample size (87 sessions of data across 29 participants), and while useful for providing a proof-ofconcept demonstration, will need replication to establish their generalizability. Second, our reliance on the State Mindfulness Scale, administered retrospectively at the end of each session, is susceptible to recall bias and fundamentally reduces assessment to a singular value. This further constrains the temporal granularity of identified mind-brain relationships, necessitating averaging spectral power indices across the full 10-min induction to maintain temporal alignment with SMS scores. Future work utilizing repeated experience sampling probes within a session could better characterize the temporal dynamics of practice. Furthermore, the SMS is not designed to provide highly granular differentiation between the diverse experiential and metacognitive dimensions of meditation. Consequently, future studies may benefit from incorporating more phenomenologically oriented approaches, such as the Lyon Assessment of Meditation Phenomenology (LAMP; Abdoun et al., 2025), or Temporal Experience Tracing (Jachs et al., 2022; Lewis-Healey et al., 2024), which may offer a richer and more detailed characterization of meditation experience across multiple domains (e.g., mental content, motivation, meta-awareness). Although an important strength of our methodology was to use hierarchical modeling to test for how the SMS-power relationship varies by region across induction, our primary analytic approach modeled regional power as nested within sessions, resulting in multiple observations per session. While this structure is standard for testing regional moderation, the repeating observations may underestimate standard errors, potentially inflating statistical significance. Thus, we conducted supplemental sensitivity analyses using an alternative model specification with two-way region x induction interactions that treat regional power values as separate predictors, effectively unnesting region and reducing the number of repeated observations within session (see OSF for full model output). Importantly, the sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of our core finding that frontal and posterior regions exhibit opposing patterns of spectral power-SMS relationships during the meditation practices, demonstrating that the region-specific patterns reported here are unlikely a sole product of the nested model structure. Additionally, while our analyses allowed us to contrast FA and OM states with an active control condition, the processes elicited during the active control require their own consideration and scrutiny. In this case, the control condition was a narrative podcast episode (TED talk) that differed considerably in content, structure, and engagement relative to the two guided inductions. These qualitative differences were clearly reflected in the manipulation check findings, in which significantly stronger engagement, interest, emotional reactions, arousal, understanding and learning occurred, relative to FA and OM. These differing engagement profiles may have contributed to some of the observed differences in spectral power among conditions. Other work examining meditation-related spectral power effects has utilized “instructed mind-wandering” as an active control condition (Braboszcz et al., 2017; Cahn et al., 2010). Thus, it would be worth investigating whether the observed results would replicate if such a condition were implemented in the current design as a parallel guided active control induction. Furthermore, we instructed participants to keep their eyes open during the audio inductions to mitigate sleepiness and vigilance-related confounds, which we acknowledge diverges from the more prevalent eyes-closed induction paradigms. Consequently, the present findings are not directly comparable to the eyes-closed literature and may introduce limitations to the scope of interpretability and generalizability. In particular, the eyes-open condition may interact with the distinct attentional demands of the two practices. OM encourages broad receptivity to all arising stimuli, which inherently increases visual sensory input from open eyes, a process known to suppress posterior alpha power. In contrast, FA involves internalization of awareness on the breath, which may restrict visual input processing and thereby attenuate suppression of alpha power. It is thus possible that the observed divergence in alpha power could partially reflect differences in visual engagement rather than meditation state quality alone.

  Meditation-Specific Neural Predictors of State Mindfulness During Eyes Open Meditation · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Mindfulness and Compassion Interventions

• The effect of mindfulness-based therapy on anxiety and depression: A meta-analytic review. · Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology · 2010 · 2,968 citations
• A randomized controlled trial of mindfulness meditation versus relaxation training: Effects on distress, positive states of mind, rumination, and distraction · Annals of Behavioral Medicine · 2007 · 909 citations
• What is compassion and how can we measure it? A review of definitions and measures · Clinical Psychology Review · 2016 · 829 citations
• Self-Compassion: Theory, Method, Research, and Intervention · Annual Review of Psychology · 2022 · 732 citations
• Investigating the phenomenological matrix of mindfulness-related practices from a neurocognitive perspective. · American Psychologist · 2015 · 551 citations
• Mindfulness Meditation Training in Adults and Adolescents With ADHD · Journal of Attention Disorders · 2007 · 514 citations
• Mindfulness-based stress reduction for the treatment of adolescent psychiatric outpatients: A randomized clinical trial. · Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology · 2009 · 496 citations
• Exploring self‐compassion and empathy in the context of mindfulness‐based stress reduction (MBSR) · Stress and Health · 2010 · 450 citations
• How long does a mindfulness‐based stress reduction program need to be? A review of class contact hours and effect sizes for psychological distress · Journal of Clinical Psychology · 2009 · 434 citations
• The Empirical Status of Mindfulness-Based Interventions: A Systematic Review of 44 Meta-Analyses of Randomized Controlled Trials · Perspectives on Psychological Science · 2021 · 392 citations

Most recent work

• How Would You Treat a Friend? Part 2: Activities to Boost Self-Compassion within School Health Curricula · Journal of Physical Education Recreation & Dance · 2026
• Self‐Soothing Touch Reduces Momentary Stress, Fatigue, and Loneliness Comparable to Brief Meditation: A Randomised Controlled Trial · Stress and Health · 2026
• How Would You Treat a Friend? Part 3: Trauma-Informed Considerations for Teaching Mindful Self-Compassion · Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance · 2026
• Self-awareness, Mindfulness, and Social Work Practice · Clinical Social Work Journal · 2026
• Preliminary Validation of a Novel Digital Measure of Emotion Regulation (The Three Circles) in Adolescents · Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal · 2026
• Feeling Good About Wellness? A Qualitative Case Study of SBAE Teacher Wellness · Journal of Agricultural Education · 2026
• The effects of mindfulness‐based interventions on emotion regulation/dysregulation in people with mental health conditions: A systematic review and meta‐analysis · JCPP Advances · 2026
• Digital mindfulness, trait anxiety, and psychological wellbeing: the chain mediating roles of emotion regulation and self-compassion · Frontiers in Education · 2026
• MIND-BODY PRACTICES AND PHYSIOLOGICAL HEALTH · Research · 2026
• Effects of Classical Music-Based Mindfulness Meditation on State Emotional Intelligence : Sequential Mediation of Mindful Awareness and Emotion Regulation · Journal of Arts Psychotherapy · 2026

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