article review/ will attach article
Psychoneuroimmunology describes how psychological processes affect health and immunity. Next week we will discuss this topic in more detail. However, this week you will write a review of the Davidson and colleagues (2003) original research article.
Davidson, R. J., Kabat-Zinn, J., Schumacher, J., Rosenkranz, M., Muller, D., Santorelli, S. F., … Sheridan, J. F. (2003). Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindfulness meditation. Psychosomatic Medicine, 65(4), 564–570. doi:10.1097/01.PSY.0000077505.67574.E3
A good review will provide a description of the introduction (reasons to do the study, researcher’s questions and hypotheses, etc.), the methods, and the results.
A good paper would start off with a brief introduction of the article (do not copy the abstract). Describe the researchers’ questions, how they attempted to answer them (i.e., study population, their methods, and any unique features of the study), and their findings. Then critique the article with the following questions.
Do you have confidence in the researchers’ findings (i.e., were there critical flaws in the study design, questions of confounds that might have occurred in the study)?
Does the study generalize to other people that were not the subject of the research (e.g., college student study generalizing to everyone, study in the US applying to other cultures)?
What does the study mean in the big picture and how does it apply to society in general (i.e., how does it impact society in general)?
Be sure to include the reference of the paper in your submission.
Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness Meditation RICHARD J. DAVIDSON, PHD, JON KABAT-ZINN, PHD, JESSICA SCHUMACHER, MS, MELISSA ROSENKRANZ, BA, DANIEL MULLER, MD, PHD, SAKI F. SANTORELLI, EDD, FERRIS URBANOWSKI, MA, ANNE HARRINGTON, PHD, KATHERINE BONUS, MA, AND JOHN F. SHERIDAN, PHD
Objective: The underlying changes in biological processes that are associated with reported changes in mental and physical health in response to meditation have not been systematically explored. We performed a randomized, controlled study on the effects on brain and immune function of a well-known and widely used 8-week clinical training program in mindfulness meditation applied in a work environment with healthy employees. Methods: We measured brain electrical activity before and immediately after, and then 4 months after an 8-week training program in mindfulness meditation. Twenty-five subjects were tested in the meditation group. A wait-list control group (N � 16) was tested at the same points in time as the meditators. At the end of the 8-week period, subjects in both groups were vaccinated with influenza vaccine. Results: We report for the first time significant increases in left-sided anterior activation, a pattern previously associated with positive affect, in the meditators compared with the nonmedi- tators. We also found significant increases in antibody titers to influenza vaccine among subjects in the meditation compared with those in the wait-list control group. Finally, the magnitude of increase in left-sided activation predicted the magnitude of antibody titer rise to the vaccine. Conclusions: 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. Key words: meditation, mindfulness, EEG, immune function, brain asymmetry, influenza vaccine
HIV � human immunodeficiency virus; NK � natural killer cell; EEG � electroencephalography; EOG � electrooculography; PA- NAS � Positive and Negative Affective Scale; MBSR � mindful- ness-based stress reduction; MANOVA � multivariate analysis of variance.
INTRODUCTION
With the widespread and growing use of meditative prac-tices in hospitals and academic medical centers for outpatients presenting with a range of chronic stress and pain-related disorders and chronic diseases, under the um- brella of what has come to be called mind/body or integrative medicine, the question of possible biological mechanisms by which meditation may affect somatic, cognitive, and affective processes becomes increasingly important. Research on the biological concomitants of meditation practice is sparse and has mostly focused on changes that occur during a period of meditation compared with a resting control condition in a single experimental session (1–3). Whereas these studies have been informative, they tell us little about changes that are potentially more enduring. Moreover, virtually all forms of meditation profess to alter everyday behavior, effects that are by definition not restricted to the times during which formal
meditation itself is practiced. Thus, in the current report, we focus not on the period of meditation itself, but rather on the more enduring changes that can be detected in baseline brain function as well as brain activity in response to specific emotional challenges.
We focus on emotion-related brain activity because medi- tation has been found in numerous studies to reduce anxiety and increase positive affect (4–8). In an extensive corpus of work on the functional neuroanatomical substrates of emotion and affective style, we have established that the frontal regions of the brain exhibit a specialization for certain forms of positive and negative emotion (9, 10). Left-sided activation in several anterior regions is observed during certain forms of positive emotion and in subjects with more dispositional pos- itive affect (10, 11). We therefore hypothesized that because meditation decreases anxiety and increases positive affect, subjects who were practicing meditation should show in- creased left-sided activation in these territories compared with those in a wait-list control group.
Recent studies have established that greater relative left- sided anterior activation at baseline is associated with en- hanced immune function using measures of NK activity (12, 13). There has been a paucity of serious research attention to possible immune alterations that might be produced by med- itation (14). This is somewhat surprising in light of the fact that negative psychosocial influences on immunity have now been well established (15–17). Recent research indicates that relaxation and stress management procedures increase T-cy- totoxic/suppressor (CD3�CD) lymphocytes in HIV-infected men (18). On the basis of recent research demonstrating the negative impact of stressful life events on antibody titers in response to influenza vaccine (19), we vaccinated all subjects at the end of the 8-week meditation program (in mid Novem- ber), along with the subjects in wait-list control group at the same time. We hypothesized that the meditators would show greater antibody titers in response to the vaccine compared with the subjects in the wait-list control group. On the basis of
From Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience (R.J.D., J.S., M.R.), Depart- ment of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin; Stress Reduction Clinic, Division of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine (J.K.-Z., S.F.S., F.U.), Department of Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts; Departments of Medicine and Microbiol- ogy (D.M.), University of Wisconsin Medical School; Department of the History of Science (A.H.), Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Departments of Preventive Cardiology and Sports Medicine (K.B.), Univer- sity of Wisconsin-Madison Hospitals and Clinics Center for Mindfulness, Madison, Wisconsin; and Department of Oral Biology (J.F.S.), College of Dentistry, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
Address reprint requests to: Richard J. Davidson, PhD, Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, University of Wisconsin, 1202 W. Johnson St., Madison, WI 53706. Email: rjdavids@facstaff.wisc.edu
Received for publication April 4, 2002; revision received December 27, 2002.
DOI: 10.1097/01.PSY.0000077505.67574.E3
564 Psychosomatic Medicine 65:564–570 (2003) 0033-3174/03/6504-0564 Copyright © 2003 by the American Psychosomatic Society
the association we have previously reported between anterior activation asymmetry and NK activity, we also predicted that the magnitude of change toward greater relative left-sided activation would be associated with a larger increase in anti- body titers in response to the vaccine.
METHODS Measures of brain electrical activity were recorded before random assign-
ment to each of the two groups (Time 1) and then again immediately after (Time 2) and four months after (Time 3) the training period ended. Brain electrical activity, or EEG, and EOG (for correcting EEG for eye movements) was recorded during both baseline conditions and in response to a positive and negative emotion induction using methods that have been extensively de- scribed in previous research (20, 21). EEG was recorded from 27 sites distributed across the scalp and referenced to linked ears during 8 1-minute baseline trials, four with eyes open and four with eyes closed, presented in counterbalanced order according to our established procedures (22). EEG was also recorded during a 1-minute period before and a 3-minute period after subjects wrote about one of three of the most positive and negative experi- ences in their life. These events were listed on a questionnaire administered to subjects before the start of the entire protocol. For this task, the EEG was aggregated across the 1-minute period before and the 3-minute period after the writing itself. Data were not collected during writing because of movement artifact. The EEG was parsed into 1.024-second epochs, overlapped by 50% and then processed with the use of a fast Hartley transform method to derive measures of spectral power density in the �-band (8–13 Hz), which is inversely related to…
