Mindcare Counselling Blog

November 3, 2011 — A new study provides more evidence that people with schizophrenia have a diminished sense of mind–body connection, or "body ownership," and hints that yoga and other types of movement therapy that get patients to focus on their own body may be helpful. Katharine N. Thakkar, PhD, from the Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and colleagues measured the strength of body ownership of 24 schizophrenia outpatients and 21 healthy control patients by testing their susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion (RHI). First described in 1998, this tactile illusion is induced by simultaneously stroking a visible rubber hand and the participant's own hidden hand. "Watching a rubber hand being stroked while one's own unseen hand is stroked simultaneously often leads to a sense of ownership over the rubber hand and a shift in perceived position of the real hand toward the rubber hand," the investigators explain in their...

In times of stress, we're often encouraged to pause for a moment and simply be in the 'now.' This kind of mindfulness, an essential part of Buddhist and Indian Yoga traditions, has entered the mainstream as people try to find ways to combat stress and improve their quality of life. And research suggests that mindfulness meditation can have benefits for health and performance, including improved immune function, reduced blood pressure, and enhanced cognitive function. But how is it that a single practice can have such wide-ranging effects on well-being? A new article published in the latest issue of  Perspectives on Psychological Science , a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, draws on the existing scientific literature to build a framework that can explain these positive effects. The goal of this work, according to author Britta Hölzel, of Justus Liebig University and Harvard Medical School, is to "unveil the conceptual and mechanistic complexity o...