Neural Signatures of Personalized Responses to Mindfulness Meditation: Implications for Emotional Regulation and Mental Health in the General Population and Major Depressive Disorder
Time
3:00 PM, November 21, 2025 (Beijing)Contact Us
Email: bmehjournal@sciexplor.comSpeaker
Prof. Zhen Yuan
Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Macau, China.
Prof. Yuan is a full professor with the Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS)/Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at University of Macau (UM). His research mainly focuses on biomedical optics, cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging and brain intervention technology development. Professor Yuan has published over 350 papers in high profile journals in his fields such as Science Advances, Nature Communication, Molecular Psychiatry, Cell Reports in Physical Sciences, Research, Microbiome, Psychological Medicine, Neuroimage, Cerebral Cortex, Cortex, Human Brain Mapping, Small, Advanced Functional Materials, Nano Letters, ACS Nano, Biomaterials, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Theranostics, Optics Letters, Optics Express, Applied Physics Letters. His total citation is nearly 12000 with H-index 60 (google scholar). He is the editorial board member of Quantitative Imaging in Medicine and Surgery, Editor of Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences, senior associate editor of BMC Medical Imaging, and associate editor of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Host
Dr. Kai Zhang
School of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
Dr. Kai Zhang obtained his Ph.D. from Huazhong Agricultural University and conducted his joint doctoral research at NTU from 2021 to 2022, under the supervision of Professor Yanli Zhao, Fellow of the Singapore Academy of Sciences. He is currently a Research Fellow at NTU. He has published over 30 scientific papers, including more than 10 first-author or co-corresponding-author papers in leading international journals such as Materials Today, ACS Nano, Nano Today, Biomaterials, Small, Aggregate, ACS Sensors, and Biosensors & Bioelectronics. He currently serves as a Young Editorial Board Member of several international journals, including BME Horizon, Health Care Science, Smart Materials and Devices, Cancer Innovation, Food & Medicine Homology, Medicine Bulletin, and Biomedical Analysis.
His research interests include:
1) Nanozyme-based delivery systems derived from clinically approved small-molecule drugs;
2) Probiotic-based therapeutic platforms designed to regulate the tumor immune microenvironment and enhance immunotherapy;
3) Biologically derived material systems that improve the bioactivity and functionality of therapeutic agents.
1) Nanozyme-based delivery systems derived from clinically approved small-molecule drugs;
2) Probiotic-based therapeutic platforms designed to regulate the tumor immune microenvironment and enhance immunotherapy;
3) Biologically derived material systems that improve the bioactivity and functionality of therapeutic agents.
Introduction
Mindfulness training shows variable individual effectiveness, highlighting the need for predictive biomarkers. We investigated whether neural activity during two executive function subcomponents (spatial working memory and cognitive control) could predict mindfulness outcomes. Thirty-four mindfulness trainees and twenty-one controls underwent fMRI while performing executive tasks before and after a 4-week intervention. Mindfulness significantly reduced anxiety by altering metacognition-anxiety relationships. Distinct neural signatures emerged: increased precuneus activity during working memory and decreased left middle frontal gyrus activity during cognitive control predicted improvements, showing opposite patterns in controls. Dynamic causal modeling revealed mindfulness modulated right caudate-to-precuneus connectivity, while baseline brain activity predicted subsequent anxiety and cognitive confidence improvements. These findings demonstrate that (1) mindfulness dissociates metacognition-anxiety coupling, (2) opposing neural changes in executive components predict outcomes, and (3) pretreatment neural features forecast treatment response. Our study identifies novel brain-based biomarkers for mindfulness interventions, advancing personalized mental health approaches by enabling prediction of individual treatment outcomes.Presentation
Presentation
52
Free Discussion
14
