Center for Investigating Healthy Minds

CIHM Donor Profile: MSI…Support through Creative Service

January 20th, 2012

Dave Weiner’s way of supporting CIHM has proven invaluable. His Chicago-based marketing firm Marketing Support Incorporated (MSI) has been a behind-the-scenes creative partner of the Center for over the past two years. Dedicating his team’s whip smart talent, strategic thinking and never-ending supply of ideas, Dave hopes it’s a way to connect CIHM’s research and mission to the world.

“You have something with profound impact here,” says Dave of CIHM’s research. “It’s on the cutting-edge and it can really offer help to people. If our MSI team can be a part of the greater effort to build awareness, that’s right where we need to be.”

For over the past two years, Dave and his 100 plus team at MSI have been donating their time, talent and resources to CIHM. However to understand Dave’s interest in CIHM, you have to know a little bit more about him. Aside from spending the last 50 years building MSI into one of the country’s consistently top-ranked marketing and advertising firms, Dave’s also spent years studying and learning about human behavior and psychology, including writing four books on the topic.

“I remember meeting with Richie many years ago while writing my first book,” recalls Dave. “He’s always been willing to help out and answer questions. From there, I became involved with him, Ned Kalin and the UW-Madison’s HealthEmotions Research Institute. And when I received a note from Richie that he had established the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, I realized that now I could perhaps help him.”

“We’ve been so grateful for Dave’s generosity,” says Richie. “We simply could not do the things we’re doing right now if it were not for his support. He gives our team the resources and opportunity to think big.”

Communications director Mel Charbonneau has worked with MSI on nearly a daily basis for the past two years. “They have become like colleagues,” she says “It’s amazing how we can bring them an idea and they can help us make it reality. And, they are just great people who truly understand the importance of our work – they keep that in the forefront of all the projects we work on together.”

It also seems that CIHM isn’t the only beneficiary in the partnership. Dave has recognized how working on CIHM projects has also impacted his team. “Everyone who’s been touched by CIHM has changed a little bit. Something just happens. Perhaps its just knowing they are contributing to something bigger than themselves.”

To learn more about Dave and Marketing Support Incorporated, visit www.msinet.com

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A UW-Madison Collaborative Workshop: Living Fully

January 9th, 2012

It’s a New Year. Live Fully.

What if you found out you only had one year left to live? How would your perspective change? And what would you begin to value? Perhaps you’d look for ways to laugh more, have fun and just be present in the moment. And yet, for most of us, our daily reality is focused on working harder and balancing more, constantly challenging our ability to pause and enjoy life. Our minds are becoming accustomed to thinking ahead and losing track of the moment.

By participating in the Living Fully workshop, you can:
- Understand what it means to be present for yourself and for others
- Transform the relationship you have with stress
- Collectively provide ideas for how online applications might enhance your ability to enjoy the present moment.

You take away:
- A clearer understanding of how the mind works
- Techniques to better recognize, relate to and work through your stress
- Effective practices to help you balance thinking ahead with appreciating the moment
- A reflective and nurturing opportunity for yourself

This workshop is being offered by the UW Psychology Research and Training Clinic in collaboration with the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. Click here to learn more about participating.

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Giving Kids a Head Start with Kindness and Language in the Classroom

January 5th, 2012

What would happen if 4-year old children spent their summer immersed in cultivating kindness? This is what CIHM sought to find out, so this past summer as part of its ongoing research investigating the benefits of mindfulness practices in the classroom, CIHM’s Lisa Flook, PhD, and senior outreach specialist Laura Pinger, MS, joined with Dr. Jan Edwards and clinic director Peggy Rosin, MS, from the UW-Madison Communicative Disorders Department to conduct a pilot project in local preschool Head Start Programs. Students in one Head Start classroom participated in a six-week CIHM Kindness Curriculum that involved a focus on breathing and movement practices to develop awareness, reading selected books related to kindness and caring, and engaging in acts of kindness. Students in the other classroom participated in a seven-week TALK (Talk and Learn for Kindergarten) Curriculum aimed at increasing knowledge of code-switching (differences between ’school’ and ‘home’ talk) and phonological awareness with activities that incorporated rhyming games, music and challenges such as “can you read your teacher’s mind?”

“These are the types of programs we need more of,” says Marcia Huemoeller, executive director of the Dane County Parents Council, the agency that provides programming and assistance to local Head Start organizations. “We were thrilled with the opportunity to be involved in this research, and the initial outcomes and results we’ve seen are far better than what we could’ve imagined.”

Huemoeller hopes programs like CIHM’s pilot study can be replicated and made available to more educators to better prepare children with the skills required to promote attention and pro-social skills. “The impact would be tremendous,” she says.

To learn more about CIHM’s educational research, click here.
Photo credit: Krakora Studios of Madison, Wisconsin.

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Reflecting on Basic Goodness: An Alternative to the New Year’s Resolution

January 3rd, 2012

A wonderful entry from Founder Davidson’s personal blog…

At this time of the year when the calendar changes and the holidays are passed, we often reflect on “resolutions” for the year ahead. I don’t actually know of any empirical research that has examined whether New Year’s resolutions actually turn into reality. Of course, this begs the question of what it means to formulate a resolution in the first place, and then actually adopt it.

It seems that most of the time, such resolutions concern themselves with aspects of our behavior we do not like, and things we wish to change. As the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh once said, “When we have a toothache we know that not having a toothache is a wonderful thing but we do not pay much attention during these times and so, we do not appreciate them as much as we might.” What Thich Nhat Hanh was alluding to is that we actually have more positive emotion within us than we realize. The key, perhaps, is attending to it more and noticing when it is present.

So this year, I invite you to consider an alternative to the traditional New Year’s resolution. Instead of focusing on a behavior we wish to change or habit we may not like, reflect on the possibility of strengthening or nurturing those parts of yourself that reflect your basic goodness. Click here to continue reading >>>

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Introducing Founder Davidson’s new book, ‘The Emotional Life of Your Brain’

December 20th, 2011

We’re excited to announce that Founder Davidson’s first popular press book, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live – and How You Can Change Them, will be released this upcoming March 1, 2012!

In the book, which is co-authored with well-known science writer and editor Sharon Begley, Richie introduces a new model for our emotions. He outlines six basic emotional styles, each based upon neuroscientific evidence, that define our personality – resilience, outlook, social intuition, self-awareness, sensitivity to context and attention. In his book, Richie describes the interplay between these styles,

“Everyone has elements of each style. Think of the six dimensions as ingredients in the recipe for your emotional make-up. You might have a big dollop of Focused Attentional style, a pinch of being Tuned in to the social behavior of others, and not quite as much Self-Awareness as you’d like. Your Positive Outlook may overshadow everything else about you, although your lack of Resilience and puzzlement in certain contexts often come through. Who you are emotionally is the product of different amounts of each of these six components. Because there are so many ways to combine the six dimensions, there are countless Emotional Styles. Everyone is unique.”

He then illuminates our brain’s ability to change and how simple strategies can help people shift along the continuum of each style. And with each dimension rooted in years of Davidson’s neuroscientific research, he hopes readers’ come away understanding that they are the true architects of their emotional style.

Want to learn more about the book and how can you participate in its upcoming release?

Visit Richie’s new website www.richardjdavidson.com – a site dedicated to the book, event appearances, news stories and his latest research.
Sign-up to receive email updates as we confirm speaking engagements and book tour details

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A recently published paper from CIHM asks, How much does mindfulness matter?

December 19th, 2011

A recent story from our December CIHM Newsletter…

Donal MacCoon, PhD

Research examining the benefits of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is still in its early stages. “We know MBSR improves different aspects of people’s health, but up until now we haven’t had the ability to test what makes it work,” says Donal MacCoon, PhD, CIHM scientist and the paper’s lead author. “Up until now we have assumed that mindfulness is the critical ingredient. At CIHM, we’ve been able to develop an active control condition that can test this assumption for the first time.”

This active control intervention is called the Health Enhancement Program (HEP). In research using this active comparison intervention, participants were randomly placed in either an MBSR course or a HEP course. “The key to HEP was creating a program that genuinely promotes health and well-being, being delivered by experts in their field, who believe in what they are teaching. The goal was to create MBSR minus the mindfulness. HEP is about as close as we can get.”

For instance, HEP offered participants functional movement instead of yoga, physical activity instead of walking meditation and music-based imagery instead of body scans. And the benefits of HEP, researchers found, are quite similar to that of MBSR on questionnaire measures.

“We found that for most of our self-report measures, it didn’t matter whether a participant was in the MBSR course or the HEP course. This suggests that while MBSR offers ways to decrease stress and enhance well-being, it’s not the only way. HEP provides similar benefits.”

With other measures, researchers did find some key differences. For instance, MBSR participants reported less reactivity to pain than those in HEP. There were also differences in immune response to stressful events, a finding to be reported in another upcoming publication from CIHM scientist Melissa Rosenkranz, PhD.

So, what does this mean for mindfulness? “If we look at self-report measures frequently used in past research, the conclusion is clear,” says MacCoon. “Mindfulness is not better than ingredients that may be present in HEP. But the immune results suggest that we may need measures more sensitive and specific to uncover benefits specific to mindfulness itself.”

MacCoon highlights two advantages of research now possible with HEP. First, HEP represents a severe test for MBSR: “Any differences we find between MBSR and HEP have gone through the scientific ringer and come out the other side of a very strong test,” says MacCoon. “The results that survive should be very interesting for the mindfulness community.”

When talking about the second advantage, MacCoon concludes, “MBSR is certainly a beneficial tool, but we’re also learning more about how other programs like HEP can bring about the same benefits for people. This is actually good news. It means there are multiple ways to live a healthy life and we’ve essentially identified one more alternative or approach. At the same time, we’ve also created a research tool that more accurately pinpoints when mindfulness is making the difference.”

Developing this active control was an important foundation for CIHM’s larger study that is supported by the The National Institutes of Health, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Click here to learn more about the NCCAM study. To learn more about MacCoon’s study, click here and to learn more about HEP guidelines, click here.
This paper will appear in the Behaviour Research & Therapy Journal.
Title: The validation of an active control intervention for Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

Tags: Health Enhancement Program, mindulness, Research
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CNN Blog: Director Davidson discusses contemplative neuroscience

October 27th, 2010

Just as we sweat and flex our muscles during physical exercise, can we put the brain through a similar rigorous workout? Director Davidson discusses this and more with CNN.

Posted in Meditation | 16 Comments »

The New York Times: Dalai Lama Gives $50,000 to the CIHM

September 28th, 2010

Spurred from his longstanding relationship with CIHM Director Richard Davidson and his recent participation in the CIHM’s grand opening celebration, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has given $50,000 to support CIHM research. Read the NY Times article to learn more about this generous gift.