Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation: Insights from Neurobiological, Psychological, and Clinical Studies
Frontiers in Psychology March 6, 2017 S. Guendelman, Sebastián Medeiros, H. Rampes
Mindfulness-based interventions show clinical benefits for conditions involving emotion dysregulation, with neuroimaging revealing changes in brain regions for attention, emotion regulation, and self-referential processing. This review examines psychological and neurobiological correlates across dispositional mindfulness, mindfulness induction, interventions, and expert meditators, discussing top-down and bottom-up emotion regulation mechanisms. The authors propose distinguishing these strategies and introduce an embodied emotion regulation framework to understand psychobiological changes from mindfulness meditation. They also compare mindfulness-based interventions with other psychotherapeutic approaches for emotion regulation.