Center for Healthy Minds

Assessing how mindfulness-based training works in classrooms, Center researchers are developing programs for students and children to learn more about how an integrated approach can promote well-being in schools.

Our researchers are learning more about how very early experiences influence the developing brain and child well-being.

Center scientists are evaluating and comparing the effectiveness of brief trainings to buffer against the negative effects that acute stress has on behavior and cognitive abilities.

Are people who are better at controlling their attention, emotion or pain responses in a laboratory setting more successful at carrying that skill into daily life?

Scholars at the Center examine perceptions and experiences related to mindfulness and how they contribute to studying differing practices.

Center researchers seek to unearth how the brain processes emotions differently depending on a person’s awareness of what’s causing that emotion.

Can a mindfulness intervention impact engineering graduate students' creativity and well-being?

In collaboration with Healthy Minds Innovations, this project strives to learn how to teach and measure well-being to scale

How do people experience emotions over a period of time and what does that say about their resilience and well-being?

Center for Healthy Minds researchers are examining how emotion may play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Is hyperthermia a viable and effective treatment for depression?

Drawing from empathic accuracy tasks and imaging data from an adolescent population, this project explores additional frameworks of empathy ­that more fully examine two components of empathy.

Center scientists are conducting a pilot study with the Madison Police Department to investigate the impact of an eight-week mindfulness training program on police officers' physical and mental health.

What impacts does an in-home parent-child mindfulness training program have on children and their families?

Our researchers are developing and measuring the impact of video games to help children improve attention and develop pro-social behavior.

Center experts are developing assessments and tools that examine ways to cultivate well-being across a variety of people and contexts.

How can researchers improve jail visits for children with incarcerated parents?

What impact does well-being curricula have on educators and the students they serve? The Center for Healthy Minds is teaming up with AtentaMente, a Mexico-based group of multidisciplinary professionals, to find out.

Researchers are broadening the methods to measure mindfulness

How does a cognitive training program impact brain development in 6-year-old children?

Examining the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions across research literature

What are your emotional styles? How does your emotional style influence your well-being?

Center researchers and collaborators are building new approaches to understand the links between traditional contemplative perspectives and scientific theory to better study the scientific effects of meditation training on the brain, body, mind and behavior.

Center researchers are developing a program to teach scientifically-informed practices and principles that facilitate well-being.

Our scientists examine how individual differences in emotional reactivity and recovery to emotional stimuli, brain structure and patterns of brain activity are related to life experiences, personality, behavior, health and well-being across the adult lifespan in a large national longitudinal sample.

What drives moral behavior and greater well-being?

Is it possible to treat ADHD with Tai Chi, a form of moving meditation?

How do early experiences shape a person’s chances of developing symptoms associated with depression and anxiety? Center scientists are studying risk factors and longitudinal data to learn more.

Center researchers are investigating possible ways to prevent teacher burnout in the classroom.

Examining how therapist differences impact client outcomes

Center scientists are exploring the bodily changes associated with a specific type of yoga in individuals on the autism spectrum.

How does cognitive and neural processing of stress-related information differ in individuals with a high risk of depression?

Center for Healthy Minds researchers, along with partners at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Virginia, are creating and studying the impact of a well-being curriculum for college freshman.

Evaluating how organizations serving veterans impacted mental health treatment engagement

How can Buddhist traditions influence the study and practice of mindfulness today?

How does chronic stress impact a child's social, behavioral and cognitive development?

Center scientists and collaborators examine the impact of well-being training.

Can we use an evolutionary perspective to better understand depression?