Emotion
October 1, 2008
Cendri A. Hutcherson, Emma M Seppala, James J. Gross
748 citations
A brief loving-kindness meditation exercise, lasting only a few minutes, increased feelings of social connection and positivity toward strangers, as measured by both explicit and implicit measures, compared to a closely matched control task. The findings suggest that this simple technique may help reduce social isolation and increase positive social emotions.
Emotion
February 6, 2012
Michael D. Mrazek, Jonathan Smallwood, Jonathan W. Schooler
604 citations
Mindfulness and mind-wandering are opposing constructs. In a first study, higher dispositional mindfulness, measured by the Mindful Attention and Awareness Scale, correlated negatively with four measures of mind-wandering, confirming their inverse relationship. In a second study, eight minutes of mindful breathing reduced behavioral indicators of mind-wandering during a Sustained Attention to Response Task, compared with passive relaxation or reading. These findings clarify the opposition between the two constructs and help integrate separate lines of research.
Emotion
February 1, 2010
Norman A. S. Farb, Adam K. Anderson, Helen S. Mayberg et al.
523 citations
Mindfulness training alters the brain's response to sadness, shifting activity from self-referential cortical midline regions toward right-lateralized visceral and somatosensory areas associated with body sensation. After eight weeks of mindfulness training, participants showed this distinct neural pattern during sadness provocation compared to waitlisted controls, even though both groups reported equivalent levels of sadness. The greater somatic brain response in the mindfulness group was linked to lower depression scores. Restoring balance between affective and sensory neural networks—supporting conceptual versus body-based emotion representations—may be one mechanism through which mindfulness reduces vulnerability to dysphoric reactivity.
Emotion
February 1, 2010
Richard J. Davidson
370 citations
Mindfulness practice primarily targets emotion, with transformation in trait affect being a key goal across contemplative traditions. The term "mindfulness" is used in multiple ways—referring to states, traits, and experimentally manipulated variables—so it is essential to specify how it is operationalized in each context. Methodological issues include the duration of training and how it should be measured, as well as the nature of control and comparison groups in studies of mindfulness-based interventions. The commentary also considers which targets within emotion processing are likely to be impacted by mindfulness, highlighting substantial progress in the empirical study of the field.
Emotion
February 1, 2010
J. Mark G. Williams
264 citations
Emotions evolved as signaling systems that must respond to environmental cues. Emotional dysregulation arises when mental representations of past, present, and future become independent of external reality. Mindfulness training helps people distinguish such mental simulations from actual circumstances. Articles in this Special Section demonstrate that even brief laboratory mindfulness training alters processing of affective stimuli; long-term meditators show distinct pain reactions; longer meditation practice correlates with brain structure differences; eight weeks of mindfulness practice changes emotion processing, enabling participants to uncouple the sensory self from the narrative self; and mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and helps people discuss past crises specifically without being overwhelmed.
Emotion
January 1, 2010
Jocelyn A. Sze, Anett Gyurak, Joyce W. Yuan et al.
241 citations
People who train in practices that increase body awareness show greater moment-to-moment alignment between their subjective emotional feelings and their heart period. Experienced Vipassana meditators, who attend to visceral sensations, had the highest coherence, followed by dancers, who attend to somatic sensations, with controls having the lowest coherence. The findings suggest that specialized training in body awareness enhances the coherence between subjective and physiological aspects of emotion.
Emotion
February 1, 2010
Emily Hargus, Catherine Crane, Thorsten Barnhofer et al.
213 citations
Depressed participants who had experienced suicidal crises described warning signs for their last crisis. Those randomly assigned to mindfulness-based cognitive therapy plus treatment as usual, compared with treatment as usual alone, showed significant improvements in meta-awareness and memory specificity after three months. Mindfulness training may help patients reflect on past crises in a detailed and decentered way, which could aid in preventing relapse.
Emotion
January 1, 2010
Baldwin M. Way, J. David Creswell, Naomi I. Eisenberger et al.
212 citations
Among 27 normal young adults, dispositional mindfulness was negatively correlated with resting neural activity in self-referential processing areas and in the amygdala bilaterally, whereas depressive symptomatology was positively correlated with resting activity in similar areas, including the right amygdala. During viewing of negative emotional faces, amygdala reactivity was positively correlated with depressive symptoms and negatively correlated with mindfulness, an effect largely attributable to differences in resting activity. These findings suggest that mindfulness is linked to intrinsic neural activity and that changes in resting amygdala activity may be a mechanism through which mindfulness-based depression treatments produce therapeutic improvement.
Emotion
January 1, 2010
D. Perlman, Tim V Salomons, Richard J. Davidson et al.
203 citations
Pain can be regulated through different cognitive mechanisms. Two meditation practices were compared during noxious heat: Focused Attention, which may regulate negative affect via sensory gating, and Open Monitoring, which may regulate negative affect through nonjudgmental awareness. Long-term meditators, compared to novices, reported significantly less unpleasantness, but not intensity, of pain while practicing Open Monitoring. No significant effects were found for Focused Attention. This finding highlights a possible regulatory mechanism underlying meditation-based clinical interventions such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
Emotion
November 7, 2016
Hayley Rahl, Emily K. Lindsay, Laura E. Pacilio et al.
171 citations
Training in acceptance is a critical driver of mindfulness-training reductions in mind wandering. Healthy young adults (N = 147) were randomized to a 3-day brief mindfulness training incorporating both attention monitoring and acceptance, attention monitoring only, relaxation training, or an active reading-control condition. The attention-monitoring plus acceptance condition had the lowest mind wandering on a sustained attention task, significantly lower than attention-monitoring only. This suggests acceptance skills may facilitate emotion regulation on boring and frustrating tasks that foster mind wandering.
Emotion
October 15, 2019
Patty van Cappellen, Lahnna I Catalino, Barbara L. Fredrickson
42 citations
Maintaining a new health behavior like meditation is difficult. An experiment with 240 midlife adults tested two pathways of the upward spiral theory of lifestyle change, which holds that positive emotions help sustain new behaviors. Participants were randomly assigned to learn about prioritizing positivity or a control topic, and to practice either loving-kindness meditation (which generates positive emotions) or mindfulness meditation (which does not). Those exposed to the prioritizing positivity microintervention experienced more positive emotions during loving-kindness meditation than during mindfulness meditation. The more positive emotions participants felt during their first meditation session, the more frequently and longer they meditated over the next 21 days. Initial enjoyment of meditation can be amplified and predicts continued practice.
Emotion
November 21, 2024
Emily K. Lindsay, Shinzen Young, J. David Creswell
9 citations
Mindfulness training, especially acceptance training, can broaden awareness to include more positive affective experiences. This has important implications for understanding coping and affect dynamics following mindfulness interventions.
Emotion
June 1, 2019
Alon Alkoby, Ruthie Pliskin, E. Halperin et al.
People differ in their ability to flexibly choose between engaging and disengaging emotion regulation strategies depending on the situation, a skill called regulatory choice flexibility that is linked to better mental health and well-being. An 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program increased this flexibility in college students compared to a waitlist control group. After the workshop, MBSR participants were more likely than controls to choose reappraisal (an engaging strategy) for low-intensity emotional stimuli and distraction (a disengaging strategy) for high-intensity stimuli, indicating more adaptive regulatory choices.
Emotion
February 1, 2010
P. Goldin, J. Gross
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) training in adults with social anxiety disorder (SAD) reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression and improved self-esteem. After completing MBSR, patients showed decreased negative emotion experience and reduced amygdala activity during a breath-focused attention task, alongside increased activity in brain regions involved in attentional deployment. These changes were not seen during a distraction-focused attention task. The findings suggest MBSR may reduce emotional reactivity and enhance emotion regulation in SAD, potentially decreasing avoidance behaviors and automatic emotional responses to negative self-beliefs.