Monday, January 21, 2013

Intersection Of Meditation & Human-Cell Aging

Alan Kazdin, a Yale psychologist, has decided it will be in his new journal, Clinical Psychological Science. Started this month by the Association for Psychological Science, the journal is an attempt to provide a high-profile home for interdisciplinary research that pushes the study of mental health in new—and curious—directions.

The director of the Yale Parenting Center, Kazdin formerly edited the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, a premier publication in the field. The JCCP is the “Wimbledon” of clinical psychology, he says, but its contributors are largely limited to that specialty. “It will be very hard for them to get out of their mode and open widely to a variety of disciplines,” he says. CPS is intended to fill that void.

Quick to spiel, Kazdin rattles off some of the work he’s looking for: It could be a study connecting childhood abuse to adult violence. Perhaps it’s epigenetic influences on the mental development of human beings—or mice. Maybe there’s some basic animal research that could inform studies of Alzheimer’s. All of it would be fair game, he says.

And, of course, there’s the work on aging cells and mindfulness.

Published in the journal’s first issue by a group of psychiatrists and biochemists at the University of California at San Francisco, the study searched for links between the tendency of a subject’s mind to wander and his or her telomere length. (Telomeres are stretches of repetitive DNA that sit at the end of human chromosomes, protecting them from harm.)


- More Here

Alan Kazdin Clinical Psychological Science Interview from Psych Science on Vimeo.


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