Facial emotion perception in real life is inevitably influenced by the affective context, such as the expressions on nearby people's faces. However, to what extent and how the expressions of others exert a contextual influence on our interpretation of target facial emotions remains largely unclear. Using psychophysical methods, we demonstrated that the emotional facial context alone (i.e.,...
EmotionAugust 1, 2025Wenying Yuan, Junyao Chang, Feng Jiang et al.
Deficits in self-compassion heighten the vulnerability of mental disorders and jeopardize well-being, emphasizing the necessity of fostering self-compassion during unexpected suffering. In this research, we investigate awe as an antecedent for promptly promoting self-compassion. Across five studies (three preregistered), employing various self-compassion metrics (self-report scale and...
= .21). Results suggest that mindfulness training, and acceptance training in particular, can broaden awareness to include more positive affective experiences. This work has important implications for understanding coping and affect dynamics following mindfulness interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
EmotionAugust 3, 2023Ryan Smith, Michelle R. Persich, Anne E. Chuning et al.
Socio-emotional skills, such as the ability to recognize, understand, and regulate the emotions of self and others, are associated with both physical and emotional health. The present study tested the effectiveness of a recently validated online training program for increasing these emotional skills in adults. In this study, 448 participants (323 female) were randomly assigned to complete this...
Research on attachment theory holds that insecure attachment influences people's daily social and emotional experiences. Mindfulness meditation and loving-kindness meditation have been associated with improvements in physical and mental well-being often through their influence on emotion experience and regulation. Yet, little research has examined how emotional well-being may be improved in...
New health behaviors are difficult to maintain and meditation is no different. We tested two key pathways of the upward spiral theory of lifestyle change (Fredrickson, 2013), which identifies positive emotions as critical ingredients for the maintenance of new health behaviors. The present experiment combined a laboratory session that introduced novices to meditation with a 3-week follow-up...
EmotionJune 1, 2019Alon Alkoby, Ruthie Pliskin, E. Halperin et al.
Individuals encounter a variety of emotional challenges daily, with optimal emotion modulation requiring adaptive choice among available means of regulation. However, individuals differ in the ability to flexibly and adaptively move between engaging and disengaging emotion regulation (ER) strategies as per contextual demands, referred to as regulatory choice flexibility. Greater regulatory...
Dispositional mindfulness is often linked to higher positive affect and lower negative affect, and coping with stress has been hypothesized to mediate these links. However, few studies have explicitly tested the ways in which stress appraisals, coping strategies, or coping flexibility (i.e., fit of coping to controllability appraisals) uniquely relate to mindfulness and well-being. Drawing on a...
Mindfulness meditation programs, which train individuals to monitor their present-moment experience in an open or accepting way, have been shown to reduce mind wandering on standardized tasks in several studies. Here we test 2 competing accounts for how mindfulness training reduces mind wandering, evaluating whether the attention-monitoring component of mindfulness training alone reduces mind...
Compassion is critical for societal wellbeing. Yet, it remains unclear how specific thoughts and feelings motivate compassionate behavior, and we lack a scientific understanding of how to effectively cultivate compassion. Here, we conducted 2 studies designed to a) develop a psychological model predicting compassionate behavior, and b) test this model as a mediator of a Compassion Meditation...
Meditation practices purportedly help people develop focused and sustained attention, cultivate feelings of compassionate concern for self and others, and strengthen motivation to help others who are in need. We examined the impact of 3 months of intensive meditative training on emotional responses to scenes of human suffering. Sixty participants were assigned randomly to either a 3-month...
The effects of two kinds of meditation (open presence and focused) on the facial and physiological aspects of the defensive response to an aversive startle stimulus were studied in a Buddhist monk with approximately 40 years of meditation experience. The participant was exposed to a 115-db, 100-ms acoustic startle stimulus under the 2 meditation conditions, a distraction condition (to control...
Research into both mindfulness and mind-wandering has grown rapidly, yet clarification of the relationship between these two seemingly opposing constructs is still absent. A first study addresses the relationship between a dispositional measure of mindfulness (Mindful Attention and Awareness Scale, MAAS) and converging measures of both self-reported and indirect markers of mind-wandering....
Contemplative practices are believed to alleviate psychological problems, cultivate prosocial behavior and promote self-awareness. In addition, psychological science has developed tools and models for understanding the mind and promoting well-being. Additional effort is needed to combine frameworks and techniques from these traditions to improve emotional experience and socioemotional behavior....
We examined the impact of training-induced improvements in self-regulation, operationalized in terms of response inhibition, on longitudinal changes in self-reported adaptive socioemotional functioning. Data were collected from participants undergoing 3 months of intensive meditation training in an isolated retreat setting (Retreat 1) and a wait-list control group that later underwent identical...
Recovery from emotional challenge and increased tolerance of negative affect are both hallmarks of mental health. Mindfulness training (MT) has been shown to facilitate these outcomes, yet little is known about its mechanisms of action. The present study employed functional MRI (fMRI) to compare neural reactivity to sadness provocation in participants completing 8 weeks of MT and waitlisted...
This commentary reflects on the articles in this Special Issue. The appearance of this group of articles underscores the important idea that a major target of mindfulness practice is on emotion. Transformation in trait affect is a key goal of all contemplative traditions. This commentary addresses several key methodological and conceptual issues in the empirical study of mindfulness. The many...
The author reviews the articles in the Special Section on Mindfulness, starting from the assumption that emotions evolved as signaling systems that need to be sensitive to environmental contingencies. Failure to switch off emotion is due to the activation of mental representations of present, past, and future that are created independently of external contingencies. Mindfulness training can be...
The authors examined the effects of mindfulness training on 2 aspects of mode of processing in depressed participants: degree of meta-awareness and specificity of memory. Each of these has been suggested as a maladaptive aspect of a mode of processing linked to persistence and recurrence of symptoms. Twenty-seven depressed participants, all of whom had experienced suicidal crises, described...
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is an established program shown to reduce symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. MBSR is believed to alter emotional responding by modifying cognitive–affective processes. Given that social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by emotional and attentional biases as well as distorted negative self-beliefs, we examined MBSR-related changes in the...
Zen meditation has been associated with low sensitivity on both the affective and the sensory dimensions of pain. Given reports of gray matter differences in meditators as well as between chronic pain patients and controls, the present study investigated whether differences in brain morphometry are associated with the low pain sensitivity observed in Zen practitioners. Structural MRI scans were...
Despite encouraging preliminary findings regarding the efficacy of mindfulness and acceptance-based treatments for a range of psychological presentations, we have yet to elucidate mechanisms of action within these treatments. One mechanism through which mindfulness may reduce psychological symptoms and promote functioning is enhancing emotional responding and regulation. In this study, we used...
Two fundamental issues in emotion theory and research concern: (a) the role of emotion in promoting response coherence across different emotion systems; and (b) the role of awareness of bodily sensations in the experience of emotion. The present study poses a question bridging the two domains; namely, whether training in Vipassana meditation or dance, both of which promote attention to certain...
To better understand the relationship between mindfulness and depression, we studied normal young adults (n = 27) who completed measures of dispositional mindfulness and depressive symptomatology, which were then correlated with (a) rest: resting neural activity during passive viewing of a fixation cross, relative to a simple goal-directed task (shape-matching); and (b) reactivity: neural...
Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that can be regulated by many different cognitive mechanisms. We compared the regulatory qualities of two different meditation practices during noxious thermal stimuli: Focused Attention, directed at a fixation cross away from the stimulation, which could regulate negative affect through a sensory gating mechanism; and Open Monitoring,...