Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 28, August 2019, Pages 184-191
Current Opinion in Psychology

Positive psychological states in the arc from mindfulness to self-transcendence: extensions of the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory and applications to addiction and chronic pain treatment

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.01.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The MMT elucidates the positive psychological mechanisms of mindfulness.

  • The MMT involves decentering, attentional broadening, reappraisal, and savoring.

  • Here we discuss how these mechanisms produce self-transcendence and meaning.

  • We present applications of the MMT to the treatment of addiction and chronic pain.

The Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory (MMT) is a temporally dynamic process model of mindful positive emotion regulation that elucidates downstream cognitive-affective mechanisms by which mindfulness promotes health and resilience. Here we review and extend the MMT to explicate how mindfulness fosters self-transcendence by evoking upward spirals of decentering, attentional broadening, reappraisal, and savoring. Savoring is highlighted as a key, potential means of inducing absorptive experiences of oneness between subject and object, amplifying the salience of the object while imbuing the sensory-perceptual field with affective meaning. Finally, this article provides new evidence that inducing self-transcendent positive emotions and nondual states of awareness through mindfulness-based interventions may restructure reward processing and thereby produce therapeutic effects on addictive behavior (e.g. opioid misuse) and chronic pain syndromes.

Section snippets

Extending the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory toward self-transcendence

The MMT specifies a recursive cycle of positive psychological processes, including decentering, attentional broadening, reappraisal, and savoring that kindles momentary states of meta-awareness infused with positive affect, such as the self-transcendent positive emotions of awe, compassion, elevation, gratitude, and love. This cycle, when repeatedly activated, is theorized to build an upward spiral (see Figure 3, innermost loop) that stimulates a gradient of self-transcendence (see Figure 3,

Clinical applications of the MMT to addiction and chronic pain

The MMT has been applied to biobehavioral models of psychological treatment for addiction and chronic pain [18]. Such forward-translation of the MMT suggests that evoking hedonic and eudaimonic well-being through the integration of mindfulness, reappraisal, and savoring would attenuate (physical and emotional) pain and enhance natural reward processing, thereby decreasing the propensity to engage in addictive behaviors.

Evidence for these hypotheses has been generated by RCTs of

Funding

This work was supported by grant numbers R01DA042033 and R61AT009296 from the National Institutes of Health awarded to E.L.G. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge David Vago for providing consultation concerning the development of Figure 1, Figure 2 and Adam Hanley for his assistance in developing Figure 3 in this manuscript.

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