Zen meditation neutralizes emotional evaluation, but not implicit affective processing of words.

Adept Zen meditators rated the emotional valence of positive and negative nouns as significantly more neutral after a meditation session, whereas a comparison group showed no change in valence ratings after a comparison intervention. The Zen group reported greater openness to experience and lower need for achievement and performance. No differential emotion effects of Zen meditation were found during lexical decision, but a global facilitation of all response times occurred after meditation, suggesting increased attentional resources. The findings indicate that meditation can down-regulate emotional sensitivity to high-level cognitive representations like words.

Study at a glance

Abstract

There is ample evidence that meditation can regulate emotions. It is questionable, however, whether meditation can down-regulate sensitivity to emotional experience in high-level cognitive representations such as words. The present study shows that adept Zen meditators rated the emotional valence of (low-arousal) positive and (high- and low-arousal) negative nouns significantly more neutral after a meditation session, while there was no change of valence ratings after a comparison intervention in the comparison group. Because the Zen group provided greater "openness to experience" and lower "need for achievement and performance" in the "Big Five" personality assessment, we used these scores as covariates for all analyses. We found no differential emotion effects of Zen meditation during lexical decision, but we replicated the slow-down of low-arousal negative words during lexical decision in both groups. Interestingly, Zen meditation elicited a global facilitation of all response times, which we discuss in terms of increased attentional resources after meditation.