Mindfulness and equanimity moderate approach/avoidance motor responses.
Cognition & Emotion September 1, 2021 Catherine Juneau, Rebecca Shankland, Bärbel Knäuper et al.
People tend to automatically approach pleasant things and avoid unpleasant ones. Two experiments tested whether mindfulness practices and the personality trait of equanimity can reduce this tendency. In the first experiment, 84 participants were randomly assigned to a breathing meditation, a body-scan meditation, or an active control condition before completing an Approach/Avoidance Task. In the second experiment, 71 participants were grouped by high or low trait equanimity. Breathing meditation and higher equanimity each reduced automatic approach and avoidance biases, while body-scan meditation did not. The findings suggest that both brief mindfulness practice and stable equanimity can weaken automatic motivational responses to positive and negative stimuli.