ArticlePsychosomatic medicine
Cognitive Defusion Is a Core Cognitive Mechanism for the Sensory-Affective Uncoupling of Pain During Mindfulness Meditation.
Article in Psychosomatic medicine. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT03117478 (The Impact of Meditation Practice on Attention and Emotion Regulation), which is not on this map. Cited by 13 papers.
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
The Impact of Meditation Practice on Attention and Emotion Regulation :Studies on Neural Correlation in Brain Imagery and Biomarkers of Stress and Inflammation
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Shedding Light on Changes in Subjective Experience During an Intensive Contemplative Retreat: The Lyon Assessment of Meditation Phenomenology Questionnaire.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2025Article
- Deconstructive meditations and psychotherapy: Transforming the perception of the self.World journal of psychiatry · 2025Review
- EEG oscillations reveal neuroplastic changes in pain processing associated with long-term meditation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Effects of an 18-month meditation training on dynamic functional connectivity states in older adults: Secondary analyses from the Age-Well randomized controlled trial.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Mindfulness, cognition, and long-term meditators: Toward a science of advanced meditation.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Decoding meditation mechanisms underlying brain preservation and psycho-affective health in older expert meditators and older meditation-naive participants.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Exploring the Embodied Mind: Functional Connectome Fingerprinting of Meditation Expertise.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2024Article
- The Effectiveness of Mindfulness in the Treatment of Methamphetamine Addiction Symptoms: Does Neuroplasticity Play a Role?Brain sciences · 2024Review
- Mindfulness intervention effect on endometriosis-related pain dimensions and its mediator role on stress and vitality: a path analysis approach.Archives of women's mental health · 2024Article
- Mind-body practices, interoception and pain: a scoping review of behavioral and neural correlates.Annals of medicine · 2023Article
- Effects of Pulsed-Wave Chromotherapy and Guided Relaxation on the Theta-Alpha Oscillation During Arrest Reaction.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Harnessing Life's Slings and Arrows: The Science and Opportunities for Mindfulness Meditation During a Global Pandemic and Beyond.Psychosomatic medicineArticle
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4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveMindfulness meditation can downregulate the experience of pain. However, its specific underlying regulatory mechanisms are still largely unknown. Here, we aimed to investigate the role of cognitive defusion-a form of psychological distancing from internal experiences-in mindfulness-based pain regulation.
methodsWe implemented a thermal heat paradigm that was designed to amplify the cognitive-affective aspects of pain in 43 novice meditators (2-day formal training; 51.2% women; 53.2 ± 7.0 years old) and 27 expert meditators (>10,000-hour practice; 44.4% women; 51.9 ± 8.4 years old). We collected pain intensity and unpleasantness reports and trait measures of pain catastrophizing assessed by the Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS), cognitive defusion assessed by the Drexel Defusion Scale (DDS), and cognitive fusion assessed by the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire, as well as of several other constructs commonly reported in the literature.
resultsExperts reported lower PCS (6.9 ± 5.2 versus 17.2 ± 8.5, p < .001) but higher DDS (39.4 ± 6.4 versus 28.9 ± 6.6, p < .001) than novices. Across participants, the PCS and DDS were negatively correlated and shared unique variance that survived adjusting for other mindfulness-related and cognitive-emotional constructs (β = -0.64, p < .001). Conversely, the relationships between PCS and other commonly reported constructs did not seem specific, as none of the relationships survived adjusting for DDS (adjusted β < 0.25, p > .05). Further supporting the relevance of DDS to pain, both the DDS and PCS specifically predicted pain unpleasantness as opposed to pain intensity. However, DDS seemed to be a more specific predictor of unpleasantness than PCS, as the relationship between DDS and unpleasantness survived adjusting for PCS (adjusted β = -0.33, p = .016), but not vice versa (adjusted β = 0.20, p = .162). We also found that the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire showed a similar pattern of associations with PCS and pain self-reports to what was found for the DDS, although these associations were less consistent.
conclusionsCollectively, these findings highlight the central role of cognitive defusion in mindfulness-based pain regulation.
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