Wisconsin Center for the Neuroscience and Psychophysiology of Meditation
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT02157766. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.
Data is sourced from official ClinicalTrials.gov public API records. Always review the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for the latest information.
Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
The Wisconsin Center for the Neuroscience and Psychophysiology of Meditation will be a highly focused center dedicated to novel and cutting edge research on the mechanisms by which meditation works. The core set of hypotheses for this Center focus on the mechanisms of two common meditation practices: Mindfulness Meditation (MM) and Loving-Kindness/Compassion Meditation (LKM-CO), both taught in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). The investigators will study both Long-Term Meditators (LTMs) as well as meditation-naïve participants (MNPs). The latter group will be randomly assigned to MBSR, a rigorously matched comparison intervention called the Health Enhancement Program (HEP; MacCoon et al., 2012), or to a Wait List (WL) control group. This will give us a comprehensive view of changes that are produced by meditation practices per se, changes generically associated with interventions designed to promote well-being, and changes that might be effects of repeating testing protocols across multiple occasions. In addition, the inclusion of both novice and experienced meditators provides a wide range of practice experience that will provide critical information on dose-related effects, information that is lacking in the research literature today. Each of the projects is focused on examining the brain mechanisms and peripheral biological correlates of meditation. Project 1 (Davidson) will examine the impact of the explicit use of mindfulness and loving-kindness/compassion strategies on emotion regulation, specifically neural, biobehavioral and hormonal indices of reactivity to and recovery from pictures of human suffering and flourishing. Project 2 (Rosenkranz) will investigate the brain to periphery pathways through which psychological factors contribute to the expression of asthma symptoms. In addition, it will examine the efficacy of meditation training in reducing the inflammatory response to an allergen in asthmatic individuals by reducing the reactivity of emotion-related neural circuitry. Project 3 (Tononi) will examine whether the previously reported increase in gamma oscillations during Non-REM (NREM) sleep in meditators is associated with changes in sleep mentation (Ferrarelli et al. 2013). In addition, project 3 will examine relations between meditation-induced changes in brain activity during sleep and brain activity and cognitive function during wakefulness.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT02157766
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Not applicable
- Enrollment
- 457 participants
Conditions and interventions
Conditions
Interventions
- Intensive Meditation Practice Behavioral
- Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Behavioral
- Health Enhancement Program Behavioral
Behavioral
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- 18 Years to 65 Years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Accepts healthy volunteers
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- Aug 31, 2014
- Primary completion
- Oct 31, 2018
- Completion
- Apr 13, 2019
- Last update posted
- Aug 2, 2021
2014 – 2019
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 4
- U.S. states
- 1
- U.S. cities
- 1
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UW Madison, Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center | Madison | Wisconsin | 53705 | — |
| UW-Madison, Asthma, Allergy and Pulmonary Research Center | Madison | Wisconsin | 53705 | — |
| UW-Health Sports Medicine & Integrative Medicine Program | Madison | Wisconsin | 53711 | — |
| Center for Sleep and Consciousness (and Wisconsin Sleep Clinic) | Madison | Wisconsin | 53719 | — |
Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.
About this trial record page
- What this page shows
- Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT02157766, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
- What this page does not do
- No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
- Where the data comes from
- Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
- Last refresh
- Last update posted Aug 2, 2021 · Synced Sep 6, 2026
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Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT02157766 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.