Improve Emotion Processing with Brief Short-Term Meditation
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“brief mindfulness meditation, but not deliberate engagement in state mindfulness, produces demonstrable changes in emotional processing indicative of reduced emotional reactivity,” – Yanli Lin
Mindfulness practice has been shown to improve emotions and their regulation. Practitioners demonstrate more positive and less negative emotions and the ability to fully sense and experience emotions, while responding to them in appropriate and adaptive ways. In other words, mindful people are better able to experience yet control their responses to emotions. The ability of mindfulness training to improve emotion regulation is thought to be the basis for a wide variety of benefits that mindfulness provides to mental health and the treatment of mental illness especially depression and anxiety disorders. Dose-response, however, has not been explored and it is not known how much meditation practice is needed to produce emotional benefits.
In today’s Research News article “Brief Mindfulness Meditation Improves Emotion Processing.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6795685/), Wu and colleagues recruited physically and mentally healthy nom- meditating university students and randomly assigned them to a daily, 15 minutes, for 7 days of either mindfulness meditation or a course on emotional awareness. They were measured before and after treatment for anxiety, and depression. They also viewed a set of emotionally positive, negative or neutral pictures and were measured for their reactions of emotion intensity, emotional memory, and emotional attentional bias.
They found that the meditation group did not change in depression levels while the emotional awareness group increased in depression producing a significant difference between the groups. The meditation group had significant reductions in both positive and negative emotional intensity following the intervention while the emotional awareness group had a significant increase in negative emotional intensity. Following the intervention, the meditation group demonstrated a significant decrease in negative and a significant increase in positive emotional attentional bias while the emotional awareness group had a significant decrease in positive and emotional attentional bias.
These results are in line with prior research in demonstrating mindfulness training producing significant improvements in depression and emotional regulation. The results, however, are particularly interesting as the meditation intervention was brief and short-term, yet had significant impacts on mood and emotional regulation. Hence, a relatively small dose of meditation practice is sufficient to produce emotional benefits. The control condition was an active control condition, which is a strength. But it may have produced increased attention to emotions increasing reactions to them. Regardless, the study demonstrates that mindfulness meditation can have beneficial effects on emotions and their regulation even after only brief and short-term practice.
So, improve emotion processing with brief short-term meditation.
“Meditation trains you to be resilient. The more you can learn to stay with all the highs and lows of your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, the more strength you can bring to each moment and experience.” – Carley Hauck
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Wu, R., Liu, L. L., Zhu, H., Su, W. J., Cao, Z. Y., Zhong, S. Y., … Jiang, C. L. (2019). Brief Mindfulness Meditation Improves Emotion Processing. Frontiers in neuroscience, 13, 1074. doi:10.3389/fnins.2019.01074
Abstract
Mindfulness-based interventions have previously been shown to have positive effects on psychological well-being. However, the time commitment, teacher shortage, and high cost of classic mindfulness interventions may have hindered efforts to spread the associated benefits to individuals in developing countries. Brief mindfulness meditation (BMM) has recently received attention as a way to disseminate the benefits of mindfulness-based interventions. Most existing BMM methods are adaptations of the classic approach. Few studies have investigated the mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of BMM. We developed a 15-min BMM named JW2016, which is based on the core concepts of mindfulness, Anapanasati (breath meditation of Buddhist Vipassana), our practical experience, and the results of scientific reports on meditation. We investigated the effects of this BMM on mood and emotion processing in an effort to create an effective, convenient, safe, and standardized BMM method that could benefit individuals with limited time or money to devote to meditation. Forty-six healthy participants (aged 18–25 years) were randomly allocated to the BMM group (n = 23) or the emotional regulation education (ERE) control group (n = 23). Forty-two of the study participants cooperated fully in all measurements and interventions (one time daily for seven consecutive days). Mood was measured with the Centre for Epidemiological Studies–Depression scale (CES-D) and the State Anxiety Inventory (SAI). Emotion processing was evaluated by assessing performance on an emotion intensity task, an emotional memory task, and an emotional dot-probe task. After intervention, the BMM group, but not the ERE group, showed a significant decreases in emotional intensity in response to positive as well as negative emotional stimuli, response time for emotional memory, and duration of attention bias toward negative emotional stimuli. Negative effects on mood state were found in the ERE group but not in the BMM group. This study demonstrated that BMM may improve aspects of emotion processing such as emotion intensity, emotional memory, and emotional attention bias. JW2016 BMM may be an effective, convenient, safe and standardized way to help practitioners remain focused and peaceful without any negative effect on emotion.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6795685/