Jonathan Gibson is Associate Professor of Psychology.

What’s your area of expertise? What do you primarily research and/or teach? And what drew you to this field?

Meditation and interoception are my primary areas of research interest and expertise. Interoception is an awareness of what is going on inside your body. Current research is discovering that this sense is really important to health and well-being. All those physiological processes meant to maintain homeostasis turn out to shape and inform our emotional and psychological state. My specific research is aimed at using meditation to increase interoception.

What drew me to this field is a good question. A short answer is I felt “pulled” towards it. Neither interoception nor meditation were ever topics I intentionally set out to study; I just sort of discovered those as I was investigating psychophysiological research in my graduate programs.