Mindfulness e Tomada de Decisão

Introduction: An emerging area in Cognitive Psychology has investigated modern interventions, such as Mindfulness, which could improve the neural and cognitive mechanisms of the executive functions and therefore apply them to improve the ability of decision-making. This Integrative Revision gathers available studies about the theme Mindfulness and Decision-making. Objective: The objective of the present study was to gather scientific and academic works about the effects of Mindfulness in the decision making and convert dispersed information in evidenced knowledge to verify if and how Mindfulness can improve the competence of human decision in several contexts (individual, social, parental, clinic and economic), compiling the existing neuroscientific evidence about it. Methods: This is an integrative descriptive review, with the research strategy to find records in which both the English terms Mindfulness and Decision-making were present simultaneously. Results: The results suggest that Mindfulness: (i) improves, specifically, the ability to evaluate the possibilities of action and its consequences (value assessment), one of the facets of decision making; (ii) increases neural synchronicity between the frontal and pariental regions of the brain; (iii) contributes to pro-social decision making, showing increased activation of the left septal region of the brain, linked to the social; (iv) improves the ability to make decisions in stressful situations and in contexts where emotional regulation and self-efficacy are required. Conclusion: All of these results illuminate an important possibility of clinically and socially sustaining Mindfulness to positively impact the ability of decision-making.Introdução: Uma emergente área da psicologia cognitiva tem investigado modernas intervenções, tais como Mindfulness, que poderiam melhorar os mecanismos neurais e cognitivos das funções executivas e, assim, serem aplicados para melhorar a habilidade de tomada de decisão. Esta Revisão Integrativa reuni estudos disponíveis sobre o tema: Mindfulness e Tomada de Decisão. Objetivo: O objetivo do presente estudo foi reunir trabalhos científicos e acadêmicos sobre os efeitos de Mindfulness nas tomadas de decisão e converter as informações dispersas em conhecimento fundamentado, a fim de verificar se e como Mindfulness pode melhorar a competência de tomada de decisão nos diversos contextos (individual, social, parental, clínico e econômico), compilando as evidências da neurociência existentes sobre isso. Métodos: Trata-se de uma revisão integrativa descritiva, cuja estratégia de pesquisa foi encontrar registros em que ambos os termos em inglês Mindfulness e Decision-making estivessem presentes simultaneamente. Resultados: Os resultados sugerem que Mindfulness: (i) melhora, especificamente, a capacidade de avaliar as possibilidades de ação e suas consequências, uma das facetas da tomada de decisão; (ii) aumenta a sincronização neural entre a região frontal e pariental do cérebro; (iii) contribui para tomadas de decisão pro-sociais, mostrando aumento da ativação da região septal esquerda do cérebro, ligada ao social; (iv) melhora a habilidade de tomada de decisão em situações estressantes e em contextos onde a regulação emocional e a auto-eficácia são requeridas. Conclusões: Todos esses resultados iluminam importante possibilidade de se sustentar Mindfulness para impactar positivamente a habilidade da tomada de decisão, em distintos ambientes, tais como: clínico ou social

Developmental trajectories of social signal processing

Most of the social cognitive and affective neuroscience in the past 3 decades has focussed on the face. By contrast, the understanding of processing social cues from the body and voice have been somewhat neglected in the literature. One could argue that, from an evolutionary point of view, body recognition (and particularly emotional body perception) is more important than that of the face. It may be beneficial for survival to be able to predict another’s behaviour or emotional state from a distance, without having to rely on facial expressions. If there are relatively few cognitive and affective neuroscience studies of body and voice perception, there are even fewer on the development of these processes. In this thesis, we set out to explore the behavioural and functional developmental trajectories of body and voice processing in children, adolescents and adults using fMRI, behavioural measures, and a wide range of univariate and multivariate analytical techniques. We found, using simultaneously recorded point-light and full-light displays of affective body movements, an increase in emotion recognition ability until 8.5 years old, followed by a slower rate of accuracy improvement through adolescence into adulthood (Chapter 2). Using fMRI we show, for the first time, that the body-selective areas of the visual cortex are not yet ‘adult-like’ in children (Chapter 3). We go on to show in Chapter 4, that although the body- selective regions are still maturing in the second decade of life, there is no difference between children, adolescents and adults in the amount of emotion modulation that these regions exhibit when presented with happy or angry bodies. We also show a positive correlation between amygdala activation and amount of emotion modulation of the body-selective areas in all subjects except the adolescents. Finally, we turn our attention to the development of the voice- selective areas in the temporal cortex, finding that, contrary to face and body processing, these areas are already ‘adult-like’ in children in terms of strength and extent of activation (Chapter 5). These results are discussed in relation to current developmental literature, limitations are considered, direction for future research is given and the wider clinical application of this work is explored

Shifting across internally and externally oriented cognition: behavioural and neural explorations using task-switching and resting-state paradigms

The human brain frequently shifts between internal and external monitoring, and these changes in cognitive content can occur spontaneously or intentionally both at rest as well as during task performance. Specific frontoparietal networks have been associated with internal and external cognition and were shown to often display anticorrelated activation. Despite this being a persistent feature of human cognition, the neuroscientific study of cognitive flexibility lacks proper investigation of the exchange between internal and external processes. Cognitive flexibility research commonly employs task-switching paradigms, which often demonstrated the presence of switch costs (decreased performance) and increased lateral frontoparietal activation in conditions where people switched between tasks as compared to repeating the same task. However, all these studies mainly focused on switching between tasks requiring attention to external stimulus features, and have not investigated switching across internal and external cognition. Specifically, no studies have ever explored task-switching involving self-referential processes. Therefore, it is of interest to the scientific community to expand our understanding of cognitive flexibility in relation to these prominent aspects of cognition. In addition to this, despite the great deal of attention towards the correlation patterns between frontoparietal networks, there is little neuroscientific research focusing on identifying specific points of change within and across these networks. Therefore, this thesis investigates the behavioural and neural correlates of cognitive shifts across self-referential and externally oriented processes using novel task-switching paradigms, and explores the changes in brain networks subserving internal and external cognition at rest using change-point detection. Chapter 3 finds significant behavioural switch costs both in the external and internal domain, as well as additional costs in switching between domains as compared to within each domain. Chapter 4 partly replicates these behavioural findings and finds domain-specific activation of dorsal attention and default mode network when preparing externally and internally oriented tasks, respectively, as well as domain-general preparatory control in lateral parietal regions and dorsal precuneus. Chapter 5 investigates the same task-switching dynamics with another paradigm using different tasks and stimuli, confirming the presence of switch costs in both domains, but not the presence of additional costs to between-domain switching. Finally, Chapter 6 investigates the brain activity around change points as found through change-point detection and reveals small clusters in mediodorsal thalamus and regions of salience and default mode networks. It also explores dynamic functional connectivity and graph measures after segmentation based on this novel approach. Moreover, it examines the differences in the above measures across chronotypes, probing the effects of arousal fluctuations on brain dynamics, as induced by circadian preferences. Together, these empirical chapters provide novel information regarding the cognitive control of domain switching when involving internally oriented versus externally oriented tasks, and regarding the resting-state dynamics of the networks underlying these processes. Due to COVID-19, the entire trajectory of the thesis was adapted to allow the conduction of online behavioural studies (Chapters 3 and 5) and the analysis of existing datasets (Chapter 6), while waiting for in-person testing to resume (Chapter 4)