Frontiers in Psychology | Consciousness Research and Mindfulness section | New and Recent Articles

Contemporary developmental psychology, positive psychology, prevention science, and contemplative research have substantially advanced understanding of human growth, resilience, flourishing, and the factors associated with psychological and behavioural outcomes across the lifespan. However, comparatively less theoretical attention has been devoted to whether the developmental processes that prece…

This qualitative narrative study explores how adults with lived experience of mental health difficulties draw on spirituality to make meaning and support recovery. Thirty participants were interviewed and asked to share their stories of spirituality, mental health and recovery. A narrative thematic analysis approach was developed to explore the superordinate theme of meaning making which comprise…

Buddhist meditation is widely studied in relation to mindfulness, emotion regulation, compassion, and well-being, yet it is often operationalized as an attentional or stress-reduction technique detached from the ethical and cultural conditions of practice. This article develops the ethical-cultural training ecology model, a Hypothesis and Theory framework that treats Buddhist meditation as a coor…

Research on AI consciousness has largely focused on whether AI systems are conscious and how humans attribute consciousness to them. Yet large language models (LLMs) increasingly function as consciousness attributors, generating judgments about whether and to what degree other entities are conscious. We introduce model-generated consciousness attribution as an object of empirical operationalizati…

IntroductionMagic, understood as a set of effects designed to produce experiences of impossibility, offers a distinctive methodological potential for cognitive science because it makes it possible to manipulate, with ecological validity, processes such as attention, perception, reasoning, and memory. Despite increasing research interest over the last two decades, the available evidence has not be…

ProblemA persistent observation troubles both positive psychology and contemplative science: people suffer in the midst of success. The wealthy report emptiness; the deeply loved report captivity; the lucid report paralysis; the renunciate remains seized by the identity of renouncing. Existing wellbeing frameworks—utility theory, composite indices, PERMA—explain this poorly because they share a h…

IntroductionAlthough meditation practice encompasses both intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions, the differential effects of individual versus group meditation settings (IS vs. GS) remain largely unexplored. This study aimed to reduce this gap by comparing the effects of a mindfulness meditation session performed in the two settings, focusing in particular on mind-wandering (MW) dynamics.Met…

IntroductionRomantic relationships play a pivotal role in young adulthood, and attachment insecurity has consistently been linked to lower romantic relationship satisfaction. Mindfulness- and compassion-based resources may be associated with this link, helping to clarify how satisfaction varies among insecurely attached individuals. Building on this idea, the present study examined whether dispos…

BackgroundMindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have been demonstrated to enhance emotional functioning, but little is known regarding the brief mindfulness training’s effects on various psychological symptoms and positive psychological resources in the long term, especially when compared to both passive and active control conditions. This study aimed to examine the effects of brief mindfulness …

The rapid growth of AI companionship has raised urgent questions about the psychological mechanisms underlying human-AI relationships. This paper investigates why and how users construct and become entrenched in relationships with AI. Drawing on the Consciousness-Only school of Buddhist psychology, this paper applies the three-natures framework and eight-consciousnesses model. According to this f…

The possibility of sentient artificial intelligence has moved from speculative philosophy to a practical interdisciplinary problem for AI, robotics, and human-robot interaction. Large language models, multimodal agents, and embodied robots can now produce first-person reports, maintain dialogue, use tools, act through sensors and effectors, and participate in socially meaningful contexts. These c…

IntroductionThe continuing impact of spontaneously recalled dreams sometimes depends upon the same kind of unfolding semantic complexity that literary scholars attribute to poetic literary metaphors.MethodsWe present the results of two online studies of impactful dreams (i.e., nightmares, existential dreams, and transcendent dreams) that reinforce this account.ResultsIn both Study 1 (N = 147) and…

IntroductionPremenstrual syndrome (PMS) is a cyclically recurring psychobiological condition affecting up to 47.8% of women of reproductive age, with considerable impact on daily functioning, quality of life and a documented economic burden linked to work absenteeism. Despite its prevalence, PMS remains substantially undertreated, and pharmacological approaches are often associated with undesirab…

BackgroundPsychological focus on supernatural credence has overlooked how behavioural engagement with the paranormal relates to wellbeing. Addressing this gap, this study distinguished between paranormal belief (PB; cognitive credence) and paranormal involvement (PI; behavioural engagement) and examined multivariate associations with positive psychological functioning. It further investigated whe…

IntroductionExperiencing oneness or nondual awareness has long been considered a core aspect of spirituality and an aim of meditation and spiritual practice. Oneness experience may lead to well-being and has various adaptive functions in everyday life. However, there has been a lack of comprehensive measures of oneness experiences that are grounded in the consensus-based reports of experienced me…

Since its publication in 1980, John Searle's Chinese Room argument has remained one of the central objections to computational theories of mind and machine understanding. In this paper, we argue that the force of the Chinese Room depends on an implausibly impoverished conception of linguistic interaction: namely, the assumption that a system capable of sustaining unrestricted Turing-level communi…

Consciousness research often uses overlapping terms such as consciousness, awareness, conscious access, subjective experience, reportability, selfhood, and metacognition. This conceptual compression can make it difficult to distinguish different awareness-related processes or to identify which capacities are preserved, disrupted, or restored across altered states. This paper proposes an organizat…

BackgroundMindfulness-based artistic–contemplative interventions, including auditory “sound pills,” have increasingly been investigated using neurophysiological measures such as electroencephalography (EEG) to promote psychological well-being and attentional regulation. However, the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying these interventions remain poorly understood.MethodsThis pilot, explorator…