Philippe Goldin, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at UC Davis and leads the Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience. His team is currently engaged in (a) basic research on the brain networks that differentiate different types of emotion regulation strategies; (b) clinical research on the neural bases of psychopathology; and (c) clinical intervention research examining the brain and behavioral mechanisms of therapeutic change during Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction, and Compassion Cultivation Training in adults with anxiety, depression and chronic pain disorders.
Parts of the interview have been edited for clarity and length.
What was the influence of Tibetan language, Buddhist philosophy, and psychology on your own research trajectory?
Huge! Having met Buddhism in Asia, not in the United States, I think I have a very different experience and background than most people in the U.S., which is often more secular and less embedded in context. One of the biggest differences is that I have studied Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Nepali and lived in monasteries, learned Tibetan Buddhist practices, and served as a translator for several different lamas in different lineages within Tibetan Buddhism. These enriching experiences provide a historical, linguistic, and philosophical context for both my contemplative practice and my own research, which you don’t really see in the United States.
Did you find a natural segue from your religious studies to psychology?
Yes, Buddhism itself is deeply psychological, philosophical, and experiential. When I came back to the United States, I was thinking medicine, law, psychology, and I thought a doctorate in psychology would be a natural flow from what I was doing before.
What is Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute and what brought it into existence?
A team at Google, led by Chade-Meng Tan, was trying to create a program for Googlers that was steeped both in contemplative practice and neuroscience. Someone recommended me so I went to Google, gave several talks, met with various teams, and a core group of us created this program. We were able to infuse clinical science, neuroscience, cognitive, and affective sciences into a 7-week program to increase the common denominator of communication skills, emotional awareness, emotional regulation, emotional intelligence, and empathy. The Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute has become highly successful and has undergone several permutations.
It was called Search Inside Yourself, which is a pun for the search engine, and it is also known as a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence leadership skills training course. I ended up teaching in Google offices in Europe and the United States. Eventually, the lawyers at Google allowed us to take the program out of Google and start the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute which is located in San Francisco and has become a platform that has trained over 1000 instructors from all over the world. We hope it continues to bring organizations a set of skills that creates better environments for work, leadership, listening, and communicating.
“…Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute .. has become a platform that has trained over 1000 instructors from all over the world. “
What is clinical translational neuroscience and how can it help us better understand how to help people with clinical problems?
Translational neuroscience is the idea of taking models, theories, and what we know about brain circuitry to help translate these into a better understanding of how clinical interventions work, whether these interventions are psychosocial, physical exercise, medication, or meditation. Fundamental to our question is what are the brain patterns associated with psychological dysregulation, how are the brain circuits modified, and how will that predict who will and won’t benefit from certain types of interventions. In essence, can we take functional brain patterns to help us understand the underlying mechanisms more clearly and modify current interventions to make them more effective?
For example, if you know that working memory is essential for certain clinical interventions and you know a certain subset of the population is not using their working memory efficiently, can they be trained on a task that increases different parts of the frontal-parietal cortical brain network that support attention and memory and subsequently make cognitive behavioral therapy, more effective? That is the translation from the neuroscience of core brain circuitry to what influences clinical interventions with the hope that the interventions become more effective.
One research topic I’m pursuing is the different forms of emotional regulation. There are various forms of emotional regulation such as suppressing what you’re feeling, distracting your attention, redirecting your attention in a goal-oriented way, perspective-taking, or even taking a compassionate orientation, which is also one type of cognitive appraisal. So you can imagine assessing current ability in these many domains and then seeing where they are weak, and then giving patients a sequence of training exercises that enhances a particular skill that is currently underdeveloped. We can potentially have several different options for training those skills and continue to assess their development.
“Mindfulness is not the end; it’s just the beginning.”
What is Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) and what promise does it hold for the field of contemplative sciences?
I think it has tremendous potential. At Stanford University, a group of us came together first to create the Center for Compassion, Altruism, Research, and Education. From that, a group of us came together to create the Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT), which initially started as a nine-week program and was later reduced to eight weeks. It is a training that includes mindfulness practice throughout to stabilize the mind and cultivate balance, and progressively goes through a sequence of different types of compassion practices to build up the skill of paying attention to others, perspective taking, recognizing suffering, then generating the wish to be free of the causes and conditions that give rise to that suffering.
This training program has blossomed and now many people are trained to lead CCT throughout the world. Just as Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction is a preliminary introduction to a few types of mindfulness practices, CCT is also a preliminary introduction to a few types of compassion practices. In the future, we need to do contemplative research on what comes next, for examples, studying more advanced practices that make use of the mindfulness training people already are using. Mindfulness is not the end; it’s just the beginning.
Interestingly, one finding from your CCT study reported that participants are more capable of regulating affective states, yet they reported less desire to regulate these emotional states. What might be happening?
We try to regulate something that we’re not comfortable with. If I become more at ease and accept my experiences, my positive or negative emotions, then there will be less need to regulate, change and modify. That is more of an acceptance stance, where we don’t need to change what we are experiencing but rather how I relate to what I’m experiencing. This is particularly relevant to physical pain, which is very hard to treat. There is some research to suggest that for long-term meditators who have chronic pain, they still experience pain but they are less bothered by it and the pain causes less interference with daily functioning. This suggests that it is possible to modify how fused we are with what we are experiencing. We can observe without getting sucked in and experiencing suffering – that is very promising.
Your study also found that reductions in mind-wandering to unpleasant topics and increases in mind-wandering to pleasant topics were related to increases in caring behaviors for oneself and others. What might explain this link?
That was surprising! What’s interesting in doing research is that we ask the questions, conduct the study, then we let the data speak. We did not expect to see an increase in mind-wandering to pleasant topics, and this suggests that mind-wandering is more complex than we think.
I actually have a study that looks at two different aspects of mind wandering: spontaneous vs intentional, which could be strategic, problem-solving, or curiosity. We did see different trajectories. We don’t trust the results from one study alone, but rather preferably from multiple studies and labs to see if there is a convergence of results. That being said, mind-wandering to pleasant things could be a form of avoidance, savoring, or a reflection of less negative and more positive reappraisal.
In that study of CCT, we did daily experience sampling twice a day, every day, for 11 weeks. What we found was that if people practiced meditation that day, there was an increase in behavior that was caring toward others and oneself. That suggests that doing some form of formal meditation frees up resources to be able to notice and to engage in behaviors that are prosocial and help others, or even helps oneself. We have another study that we haven’t published yet that studies changes in a community sample over 21 days. We did a mediator analysis to investigate the mechanisms. It appears that when participants did meditation practice, their anxiety levels decreased, and that led to increases in caring behaviors. So we know that when people are in a state of anxiety, their scope of awareness narrows, their creativity decreases, and they have less perspective-taking. When people are more calm, their field of view opens, broadens, with a greater ability to take the perspective of the other, to see, to notice, which leads to prosocial behaviors.
“So we know that when people are in a state of anxiety, their scope of awareness narrows, their creativity decreases, and they have less perspective-taking.”
How does self-care behaviors or reductions in anxiety serve as a mediating link?
We did formal mediation analysis. The reduction in anxiety served as a mediator between training in compassion and caring behaviors. If that is replicated, then you can imagine getting more precise. Similar to MBSR, Compassion Cultivation Training includes many different practices. The question becomes which practices really reduce anxiety and therefore free up resources to shift behaviors? Instead of assuming the same practices work for everyone, there is a precision tailoring of sequences of contemplative practices. That’s getting into precision well-being.
Can you capture that using fMRI neurological assessment?
Not sure. Electroencephalography (EEG) is used for individual differences and is capable of obtaining reliable data on an individual person basis. For fMRI, the signal-to-noise ratio, the strength of the signal against background noise, is very low, and thus is a concern. Therefore fMRI studies need to be done on a group and not the individual level. With stronger technology like 7 Tesla scanners, maybe we can get stronger signals from an individual participant. Our technology isn’t there yet. Maybe we can access a brain network that is robust like the self-referential network, which has been the most robust task I have used. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective because we pay a lot of attention to ourselves. We see the strongest responses in this network. There are other forms of brain imaging that might be more amenable.
In one paper, you suggest that compassion meditation might be a tool for social justice. What are you envisioning?
We have one study that was completed with my colleague, Hooria Jazaieri, in which we found that moral decision-making shifted as a function of doing an 8-week MBSR program in a graduate student sample. Another colleague, Jennifer Daubenmier, is looking at mindfulness vs compassion and its influence on social justice. If we enhance qualities that we already have like awareness, empathy, compassion, perspective-taking, can those abilities be oriented to seeing others? Can that be taken even further with regards to injustice? Everything is interconnected.
If there was one study you could win the Nobel prize for, what would it be and how would it change the world through scientific discovery?
I have yet to publish that we did a modified version of MBSR for 8-12-year-olds and their parents. That was a fascinating study since we were interested in training the family system instead of just the individual. Most studies are focused on individuals. Compassion intervention studies are inherently relational. It’s beginning to shift to a mindfulness-in-action perspective for the benefit of others. This family study was the most fascinating because we assessed kids and their parents, together and separately. This is meaningful because the goal isn’t the individual level but the family system. You can imagine the potential of parents and children engaging in these practices together and how this would affect multiple systems from a family to the rest of society.
“When people are more calm, their field of view opens, broadens, with a greater ability to take the perspective of the other, to see, to notice, which leads to prosocial behaviors.”
To Learn More about Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience visit The Goldin Lab at UC Davis.
Michael is the Founder and Chief Editor of the Science of Mindfulness.
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