"The Dalai Lama is here to give a speech titled 'The Neuroscience of Meditation.' Over the past few years, he has supplied about a dozen Tibetan Buddhist monks to Richard Davidson, a prominent neuroscience professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Davidson's research created a stir among brain scientists when his results suggested that, in the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the monks had actually altered the structure and function of their brains."
Read the full article at Wired Magazine
"What is positive psychology? Where has it come from? Where is it now? Where is it going? We identify several pertinent issues for the consideration of positive psychology as it moves forward. These include the need to synthesize the positive and negative, build on its historical antecedents, integrate across levels of analysis, build constituency with powerful stakeholders, and be aware of the implications of description versus prescription."
Read the full article at The Journal of Positive Psychology
"To flourish means to live within an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience."
Read the full article at American Psychologist
"...the evidence suggests that positive affect—the hallmark of well-being—may be the cause of many of the desirable characteristics, resources, and successes correlated with happiness."
Read the full article at Psychological Bulletin
"Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness."
Read the full article at Washington Post
"Positive interventions may...usefully supplement direct attempts to prevent and treat psychopathology and, indeed, may covertly be a central component of good psychotherapy as it is done now."
Read the full article at Annual Review Of Clinical Psychology
"We argue that neuroscience will probably have a transformative effect on the law, despite the fact that existing legal doctrine can, in principle, accommodate whatever neuroscience will tell us. New neuroscience will change the law, not by undermining its current assumptions, but by transforming people’s moral intuitions about free will and responsibility."
Read the full article at The Royal Society
"Practitioners understand 'meditation,' or mental training, to be a process of familiarization with one’s own mental life leading to long-lasting changes in cognition and emotion. Little is known about this process and its impact on the brain. Here we find that long-term Buddhist practitioners self-induce sustained electroencephalographic high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony during meditation."
Read the full article at The National Academy of Sciences
"Results from a new randomized, placebo-controlled study demonstrate that people are happier and less depressed three months after completing exercises targeting positive emotion. The ultimate goal of positive psychology is to make people happier by understanding and building positive emotion, gratification and meaning. Towards this end, we must supplement what we know about treating illness and repairing damage with knowledge about nurturing well-being in individuals and communities."
Read the full article at The Royal Society
Read the full article at American Behavioral Scientist
"Beliefs about one’s capacity to savour have important implications for understanding positive well-being. Just because one experiences positive events does not mean that one feels capable of savouring these events, that is, of generating, intensifying, and prolonging enjoyment through one’s own volition. On the contrary, the active management of positive emotion requires, not only the capacity to feel pleasure, but also the capacity to regulate it, to find it, to manipulate it, and to sustain it."
Read the full article at Journal of Mental Health
"...to the extent that positive emotions broaden people's momentary thought-action repertoires, they promote the discovery and development of people's strengths and resources,which serve as enduring reserves that can be accessed in times of need."
Read the full article at Psychology Press
"These findings demonstrate that a short program in mindfulness meditation produces demonstrable effects on brain and immune function. These findings suggest that meditation may change brain and immune function in positive ways and underscore the need for additional research."
Read the full article at Psychosomatic Medicine
"In this article, the author describes a new theoretical perspective on positive emotions and situates this new perspective within the emerging field of positive psychology."
Read the full article at American Psychologist
"The magnitude of risk associated with social isolation is comparable with that of cigarette smoking and other major biomedical and psychosocial risk factors. However, our understanding of how and why social isolation is risky for health—or conversely—how and why social ties and relationships are protective of health, still remains quite limited."
Read the full article at Psychosomatic Medicine
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