Teachers vary in their ability to enact effective teaching practices. We randomly assigned 88 early education preservice teachers to standard teacher education or teacher education plus a 9-week mindfulness-based intervention. Using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) as our primary outcome, we assessed effective teaching practices at baseline and at a 6-month follow-up that occurred during full-time student teaching.
Richie Davidson
Richard Davidson, PhD – Slide of the Week
The ability to understand emotional experiences of others, empathy, is a valuable skill for effective social interactions. Various types of training increase empathy in adolescents, but their impact on brain circuits underlying empathy has not been examined. Video games provide a unique medium familiar and engaging to adolescents and can be used to deliver training at scale.
Mental health in pregnancy may affect development of newborns’ brains
Waisman investigators and researchers explore potential connections between a woman’s mental health symptoms and white matter development in the brain of her child at one month after birth. Read the full article at: https://news.wisc.edu/mental-health-in-pregnancy-affects-development-of-newborns-brains/
Richard Davidson, PhD
Empathy, the ability to understand others’ emotions, can occur through perspective taking and experience sharing. Neural systems active when adults empathize include regions underlying perspective taking (e.g. medial prefrontal cortex; MPFC), and experience sharing (e.g. inferior parietal lobule; IPL).
Richie Davidson, PhD
Title: Enhanced Prefrontal-Amygdala Connectivity Following Childhood Adversity as a Protective Mechanism Against Internalizing in Adolescence Legend: Childhood adversity predicts greater amygdala–medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) functional connectivity (FC) in adolescence, but it is moderated by internalizing …
Richard Davidson, PhD
Title: Amygdala and hippocampal volume is reduced in children exposed to different forms of adversity Legend: Volumetric comparisons for the left amygdala (A) and left (B) and right (C) hippocampus. For each graph, standardized residuals controlling …
From The Midwest To Davos, Richard Davidson Is Starting Conversations On Mindfulness, Happiness, And The Power Of Giving
Are we in the throes of a “zeitgeist” moment, when world leaders and CEOs embrace the role that mindfulness plays in cultivating health, compassion and happiness?
Can videogames create mindful teens? UW-Madison researchers look into the therapeutic possibilities
Teenagers spurning family time and conversation for Candy Crush during the holiday season is nearly as common a sight these days as turkey and baked ham.
Davidson’s study reveals gene expression changes with meditation
With evidence growing that meditation can have beneficial health effects, scientists have sought to understand how these practices physically affect the body.
A new study by researchers in Wisconsin, Spain, and France reports the first evidence of specific molecular changes in the body following a period of mindfulness meditation.