Meditation affects word recognition of meditation novices

A longitudinal study examined how meditation affects the processing of written single words. Participants completed a lexical decision task and rated the affective valence of nouns before and after a 7-week class in mindfulness meditation, loving-kindness meditation, or a control intervention. Both meditation groups rated the emotional valence of nouns more neutral afterward, suggesting a general down-regulation of emotions. In the loving-kindness group, positive words were rated more positively after the intervention, indicating a specific intensification of positive feelings. Response times in the lexical decision task accelerated significantly after both meditation interventions, with the largest facilitation in the loving-kindness group. The authors suggest meditation may have increased attention, improved visual discrimination, broadened attentional focus, and reduced mind-wandering, enabling accelerated word recognition.

Study at a glance

Abstract

AbstractThis work represents one of the first attempts to examine the effects of meditation on the processing of written single words. In the present longitudinal study, participants conducted a lexical decision task and rated the affective valence of nouns before and after a 7-week class in mindfulness meditation, loving-kindness meditation, or a control intervention. Both meditation groups rated the emotional valence of nouns more neutral after the interventions, suggesting a general down-regulation of emotions. In the loving-kindness group, positive words were rated more positively after the intervention, suggesting a specific intensification of positive feelings. After both meditation interventions, response times in the lexical decision task accelerated significantly, with the largest facilitation occurring in the loving-kindness group. We assume that meditation might have led to increased attention, better visual discrimination, a broadened attentional focus, and reduced mind-wandering, which in turn enabled accelerated word recognition. These results extend findings from a previous study with expert Zen meditators, in which we found that one session of advanced meditation can affect word recognition in a very similar way.