Altered auditory feedback perception following an 8-week mindfulness meditation practice

An Integrative Review on the Research Progress of Mindfulness and Its Implications at the Workplace

Mindfulness has rapidly become a significant subject area in many disciplines. Most of the work on mindfulness has focused on the perspective of health and healthcare professionals, but relatively less research is focused on the organizational outcomes at the workplace. This review presents a theoretical and practical trajectory of mindfulness by sequential integration of recent fragmented scholarly work on mindfulness at the workplace. The review showcases that most contemporary practical challenges in organizations, such as anxiety, stress, depression, creativity, motivation, leadership, relationships, teamwork, burnout, engagement, performance, well-being, and physical and psychological health, could be addressed successfully with the budding concept of mindfulness. The causative processes due to higher mindfulness that generate positive cognitive, emotional, physiological, and behavioral outcomes include focused attention, present moment awareness, non-judgmental acceptance, self-regulatory functions, lower mind wandering, lower habit automaticity, and self-determination. Employee mindfulness could be developed through various mindfulness interventions in order to improve different organizational requirements, such as psychological capital, emotional intelligence, prosocial behavior, in-role and extra-role performance, financial and economic performance, green performance, and well-being. Accordingly, this review would be beneficial to inspire academia and practitioners on the transformative potential of mindfulness in organizations for higher performance, well-being, and sustainability. Future research opportunities and directions to be addressed are also discussed.

A Critical Analysis on Characterizing the Meditation Experience Through the Electroencephalogram

Meditation practices, originated from ancient traditions, have increasingly received attention due to their potential benefits to mental and physical health. The scientific community invests efforts into scrutinizing and quantifying the effects of these practices, especially on the brain. There are methodological challenges in describing the neural correlates of the subjective experience of meditation. We noticed, however, that technical considerations on signal processing also don't follow standardized approaches, which may hinder generalizations. Therefore, in this article, we discuss the usage of the electroencephalogram (EEG) as a tool to study meditation experiences in healthy individuals. We describe the main EEG signal processing techniques and how they have been translated to the meditation field until April 2020. Moreover, we examine in detail the limitations/assumptions of these techniques and highlight some good practices, further discussing how technical specifications may impact the interpretation of the outcomes. By shedding light on technical features, this article contributes to more rigorous approaches to evaluate the construct of meditation.

Speech-Induced Suppression for Delayed Auditory Feedback in Adults Who Do and Do Not Stutter

Speech-induced suppression is the normal, relative amplitude reduction of the auditory evoked potential for self-, compared to externally-generated, auditory stimulation. It remains controversial as to whether adults who stutter exhibit expected auditory modulation during speech; some studies have reported a significant difference between stuttering and fluent groups in speech-induced suppression during speech movement planning, while others have not. We compared auditory evoked potentials (N1 component) for auditory feedback arising from one’s own voice (Speaking condition) with passive listening to a recording of one’s own voice (Listening condition) in 24 normally-fluent speakers and 16 adults who stutter under various delayed auditory feedback (DAF) time conditions (100 ms, 200 ms, 500 ms, and 1,000 ms). We presented the participant’s own voice with a delay, immediately after presenting it without a delay. Our working hypothesis was that the shorter the delay time, the more likely the delayed sound is perceived as self-generated. Therefore, shorter delay time conditions are proposed to result in relatively enhanced suppression of the auditory system. Results showed that in fluent speakers, the shorter the delay time, the more the auditory evoked potential in the Speaking condition tended to be suppressed. In the Listening condition, there was a larger evoked potential with shorter delay times. As a result, speech-induced suppression was only significant at the short delay time conditions of 100 and 200 ms. Adults who stutter did not show the opposing changes in the Speaking and Listening conditions seen in the fluent group. Although the evoked potential in the Listening condition tended to decrease as the delay time increased, that in the Speaking condition did not show a distinct trend, and there was a significant suppression only at 200 ms delay. For the 200 ms delay condition, speakers with more severe stuttering showed significantly greater speech-induced suppression than those with less severe stuttering. This preliminary study suggests our methods for investigating evoked potentials by presenting own voice with a delay may provide a clue as to the nature of auditory modulation in stuttering.