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.com

Speaker

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.

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.

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