Meditation and Health: The Search for Mechanisms of Action
Social and Personality Psychology Compass January 1, 2013 Bethany E Kok, Christian E. Waugh, Barbara L. Fredrickson 39 citations
Meditation practices offer a promising method for studying how mental states influence physical health, particularly immune function, cardiovascular health, and pain perception. This review describes how meditation may work by enhancing emotion regulation, self-regulation, or repeatedly inducing specific mental states like love or meta-cognitive awareness. The field needs large randomized controlled trials with active control groups and dual-blind designs to test whether changes in cognitive and affective processes from meditation directly cause improvements in physical health. Meditation is a potentially powerful tool for understanding mind-body interactions.