Britton Lab seeks to understand the effects of meditation on a wide range of psychological characteristics.
Meditation is a broad term encompassing a range of mental training approaches. Most approaches involve particular strategies for relating to sensory phenomena, which include some combination of the five senses, thoughts, and/or emotions. One such strategy is narrowing one’s focus to the breath, and attempting to maintain continuous awareness of the physical sensation of air entering the nostrils during inhalation and exiting during exhalation. Traditional meditation authorities claim that this breath-awareness meditation can aid the practitioner in developing concentration and cultivating emotional calm.
These centuries-old techniques have been undergoing a process of repackaging over the last few decades. Patients and clinicians are searching for a cheap, portable, patient-driven solution to the modern epidemic of mood and attentional disorders. However, clinical applications of meditation have raced ahead of scientific understanding of the mechanisms by which these techniques affect the minds and bodies of practitioners. A primary goal of this lab is to help elucidate those mechanisms.
We do both clinical and translational research- we not only conduct research on participants who have clinical disorders of attention or emotion regulation, but also attempt to understand the ways in which meditation affects cognition in the “normally” functioning brain. Clinical researchers can use the understanding of meditation’s effects on cognition to generate hypotheses about when and how meditation might benefit patients suffering from psychopathology. We thus provide a link between normal cognition and the application of meditation as a treatment for psychopathology.
We are currently investigating the effects of meditation training on two non-clinical populations: 6th grade students at the Moses Brown School and college students in our Meditation Laboratories Courses at Brown University. We use a variety of methods in our studies. Please see links above for more information.
Dismantling MBCT
Information coming soon!
Difficult Stages on the Contemplative Path
This research investigates difficult or challenging mind (and body) states as a result of intensive meditation practice, and includes interviews with more than 20 meditation teachers (Jack Kornfield, Shinzen Young, Joseph Goldstein, Adyashanti) and Buddhist scholars (Thupten Jinpa, John Dunne, Alan Wallace) as well as a number of experienced practitioners.
The research investigates:
- The phenomenology of these experiences, including their duration, associated functional impairment and estimated prevalence
- The wide range of interpretations from “Progress to Pathology” from well-known teachers and Buddhist scholars
- “Exacerbating factors” (practitioner characteristics, type of practice, available support) which may exacerbate expected (but perhaps difficult or challenging) meditation effects into the need for additional support measures.
A video summary of this project can be found here. This research is very much in its early stages, and we welcome collaborators.
MedLabs
Religious Studies Professor Harold Roth of Brown University teaches a variety of courses which involve experiential learning – the equivalent of a laboratory component in a science course. These “laboratories” center around meditation. Students from these courses are eligible to participate in studies at the lab as our experimental population. These students are matched with a control population – other college students who are involved in Religious Studies courses without a MedLabs component or students in courses which require sustained awareness of the body or senses, such as music and dance courses.
Data from our MedLabs studies have been written up, and can be found in our publications section, (“Zen meditation class promotes increased positive word recall”). We are continuing to collect data from subsequent MedLabs courses and to analyze data from previous courses. If you are a student of Brown University, and would like to participate, please contact Willoughby Britton and/or Harold Roth.
Moses Brown
Meditation has been shown to be an effective 
prevention for clinical emotional disturbances. As the initial symptoms of these disturbances are first typically seen in children around ages 10-12, targeting this group with meditation may be a particularly effective strategy for preventing later onset of these emotional disturbances.
Brown University Masters of Public Health student Nathaniel Lepp began a collaboration with the Moses Brown School, where meditation instruction has been integrated into the classroom setting and children are tested before and after their training to assess the effects of meditation on their attention and emotional processes. Two posters have been produced from these studies and can be found in our publications section.
MBDRP
The general purpose of the study is to investigate the potential cognitive and physiological mechanisms of the Mindfulness Based Depression Relapse Prevention Program (MBDRP), a novel relapse prevention program for major depression. This study intends to test whether an 8-week MBDRP intervention for formerly depressed participants is associated with any changes that may be related to sustained symptom improvement.
A number of physiological systems have been targeted for investigation, based on their involvement in depression and their response to meditative techniques. In brief, the systems are a) frontal brain asymmetry, b) vagal tone, c) sleep disturbance and REM characteristics, d) cortisol reactivity, and e) α-amylase reactivity. Moreover, a number of cognitive measures, including memory, executive function (attention, decision-making), rumination (the tendency to dwell on or analyze problems) and metacognitive awareness (an individual’s relationship to thoughts and feelings) are measured before and after treatment as well.
