Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation: Insights from Neurobiological, Psychological, and Clinical Studies

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.

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Abstract

There is increasing interest in the beneficial clinical effects of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs). Research has demonstrated their efficacy in a wide range of psychological conditions characterized by emotion dysregulation. Neuroimaging studies have evidenced functional and structural changes in a myriad of brain regions mainly involved in attention systems, emotion regulation, and self-referential processing. In this article we review studies on psychological and neurobiological correlates across different empirically derived models of research, including dispositional mindfulness, mindfulness induction, MBIs, and expert meditators in relation to emotion regulation. From the perspective of recent findings in the neuroscience of emotion regulation, we discuss the interplay of top-down and bottom-up emotion regulation mechanisms associated with different mindfulness models. From a phenomenological and cognitive perspective, authors have argued that mindfulness elicits a “mindful emotion regulation” strategy; however, from a clinical perspective, this construct has not been properly differentiated from other strategies and interventions within MBIs. In this context we propose the distinction between top-down and bottom-up mindfulness based emotion regulation strategies. Furthermore, we propose an embodied emotion regulation framework as a multilevel approach for understanding psychobiological changes due to mindfulness meditation regarding its effect on emotion regulation. Finally, based on clinical neuroscientific evidence on mindfulness, we open perspectives and dialogues regarding commonalities and differences between MBIs and other psychotherapeutic strategies for emotion regulation.