Wisconsin Center for the Neuroscience and Psychophysiology of Meditation

描述（由申请人提供）：我们建议延长我们的补充和替代医学研究卓越中心（CERC）-威斯康星州中心的神经科学和心理生理学的冥想-第二个五年期。这将是一个高度集中的中心，致力于对冥想作品的机制进行新颖和前沿的研究。在下一个五年期间，原有的三个项目中的两个将继续进行，并增加重要的新组成部分。项目1（Davidson，PI）将研究明确使用正念和慈爱同情策略对情绪调节的影响，特别是神经，激素和行为（包括扫描仪中的面部肌电图）对人类痛苦和繁荣的图片的反应和恢复指数。项目2将由威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校的著名哮喘研究人员William Busse指导。基于Busse和Davidson的合作工作，建立了由哮喘相关情绪刺激激活的神经回路，预测哮喘患者的炎症反应，我们建议检查正念减压（MBSR）对改变一组哮喘患者肺部神经信号和炎症反应的影响。第三个项目将专注于睡眠，由Giulio Tononi执导。这个项目将通过检查冥想者在NREM睡眠期间伽马振荡的增加是否与睡眠期间心理内容的变化有关来扩展我们以前的发现。此外，将研究睡眠和清醒EEG之间的关系，以及睡眠EEG变化与认知和注意力测量以及经验采样测量的清醒表现之间的关系。这些项目中的每一个都将与通过我们的核心招募的同一组参与者一起进行，其中包括随机分配到MBSR的参与者，我们明确开发的积极比较干预，以测试MBSR-健康促进计划（HEP）-或等待名单（WL），以及长期冥想者（LTM）。我们相信，通过CERC的工作，对冥想产生行为和生物过程变化的机制的理解将大大提高。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We propose to extend our Center for Excellence for Research in Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CERC)-The Wisconsin Center for the Neuroscience and Psychophysiology of Meditation-for a second five-year period. This will be a highly focused center dedicated to novel and cutting edge research on the mechanisms by meditation works. In the next five-year period, two of the original three projects will continue wih important new components. Project 1 (Davidson, PI) will examine the impact of the explicit use of mindfulness and loving-kindness-compassion strategies on emotion regulation, specifically neural, hormonal and behavioral (including facial electromyography in the scanner) indices of reactivity to and recovery from pictures of human suffering and flourishing. Project 2 will be directed by William Busse, a well-known asthma researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Based upon collaborative work by Busse and Davidson that established the neural circuitry activated by asthma-relevant emotional stimuli that predicts inflammatory response in asthmatics, we propose to examine the impact of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) on altering the neural signals and inflammatory response in the lung in a group of asthmatics. The third project will be focused on sleep and directed by Giulio Tononi. This project will extend our previous findings by examining whether the increase in gamma oscillations during NREM sleep in meditators is associated with changes in mental content during sleep. In addition, relations between sleep and waking EEG and between sleep EEG changes and waking performance on cognitive and attentional measures, and experience sampling measures, will be studied. Each of these projects will be conducted with the identical group of participants recruited through our Core that will include those randomized assigned to MBSR, the active comparison intervention we explicitly developed to test against MBSR~the Health Enhancement Program (HEP)~or a wait list (WL), as well as Long-Term Meditators (LTMs). We believe that the understanding of the mechanisms by which meditation produces changes in behavioral and biological processes will be dramatically advanced through the work of this CERC.