Relaxation response may reduce blood pressure by altering expression of a set of genes

Social-evaluative stressors—experiences in which people feel they could be judged negatively—pose a major threat to adolescent mental health1,2,3 and can cause young people to disengage from stressful pursuits, resulting in missed opportunities to acquire valuable skills. Here we show that replicable benefits for the stress responses of adolescents can be achieved with a short (around 30-min), scalable 'synergistic mindsets' intervention. This intervention, which is a self-administere […]

Human pupillary dilatation after topical instillation of phenylephrine was assessed in a prospective, randomized, controlled experiment to measure alterations in α-end-organ responsivity after regular elicitation of the relaxation response. Baseline pupillometric measurements were taken in both experimental and control subjects. The experimental subjects then practiced daily a technique that elicited the relaxation response while the control subjects sat quietly for comparable periods […]

Although research has found that long-term mindfulness meditation practice promotes executive functioning and the ability to sustain attention, the effects of brief mindfulness meditation training have not been fully explored. We examined whether brief meditation training affects cognition and mood when compared to an active control group. After four sessions of either meditation training or listening to a recorded book, participants with no prior meditation experience were assessed w […]