Experienced meditators, cancer survivors, and matched controls assemble different neural resources to process emotion

Abstract

According to constructivist theories of emotion, members of different populations experience emotion differently as a result of assembling different neural resources to produce it. To test this prediction, we sampled individuals from three populations (experienced meditators, cancer survivors, matched controls) and used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess their neural responses to four kinds of affective phrases (positive cancer, negative cancer, positive non-cancer, negative noncancer). As predicted, the three populations responded differently to these affective phrases. When assessing neural activity for positive vs. negative phrases, controls showed the standard negativity bias reported in the emotion literature, cancer survivors showed a positivity bias (perhaps related to personal growth following cancer), and experienced meditators showed no bias (perhaps reflecting the mental quality of equanimity established through regular meditation practice). When assessing neural activity for positively-valenced cancer vs. non-cancer phrases, controls exhibited difficulty engaging with the cancer phrases, engaging much more with the non-cancer phrases instead. In contrast, experienced meditators and cancer survivors engaged more with the cancer phrases, while exhibiting different affective styles. Together these results indicate that experienced meditators, cancer survivors, and matched controls assemble different neural resources to process emotion.