A/Prof Nicholas Van Dam and A/Prof Scott Griffiths

Welcome to the MSPS Colloquium with Associate Professor Nicholas Van Dam and Associate Professor Scott Griffiths

Mindfulness and meditation in perspective: Who uses these practices and what do they do?

Results from a Nationally Representative Survey conducted by the Contemplative Studies Centre indicate that as many as 1/3 of Australians have used meditation in the past year, with a sizeable proportion seemingly using the practice to address unmet mental health needs. I will unpack this data, as well as give an overview of other research conducted by my team exploring trends in meditation use and what we have learned about amounts of practice potentially needed for benefits. I will also touch upon how often meditation practice may result in negative experiences and discuss broad implications of these findings for mindfulness and meditation as used for health and wellbeing.

About Associate Professor Nicholas Van Dam

A/Prof Nicholas Van Dam is the inaugural Director of the Contemplative Studies Centre and an Associate Professor in the Melbourne School of Psychological Science. His research program includes exploration of the ways that meditation and mindfulness practices can support wellbeing, as well as improved understanding and treatment of high-prevalence psychiatric disorders (i.e., anxiety, depression, substance use), and is ultimately aimed at better understanding the human condition.

Associate Professor Scott Griffiths' Abstract

“Does social media cause eating disorders?” is a key question in the field of eating disorders and a top concern for the social media industry. However, previous research has often relied on limited snapshots of social media use—for example, simplistic measures such as “How often do you use social media?” with response options from “Never” to “All the time.” These coarse self-report measures aggregate diverse social media behaviours, resulting in mixed and inconclusive findings. Beginning in 2023, our team collaborated with the Complex Human Data Hub to conduct research on TikTok, a social media platform with ~1.6 billion users. This research unexpectedly drew the attention of ByteDance and legislators, with whom we now have early-stage collaborations. In this talk, I will outline our original TikTok study and our upcoming TikTok study and share ideas for potential future projects that harness large, signal-rich social media datasets for public health screening, content moderation, and related applications.

About Associate Professor Scott Griffiths

Associate Professor Scott Griffiths arrived in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences in 2017 and leads the Physical Appearance Research Team – a group of researchers and clinicians who study appearance-related psychological disorders and related phenomena, including social media. Reasonably likeable, he enjoys cooking and gardening in his spare time.

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