Do Meditators Stress Less? Long-Term Meditators Differ in Affective but Not Autonomic Responses to an Acute Psychosocial Stressor

Abstract

Although regular meditation practice is widely assumed to buffer responses to stress, direct evidence from long-term meditators remains limited. We compared 80 long-term mindfulness meditators and 68 meditation-naïve controls on affective and autonomic responses to an acute psychosocial stressor, a modified Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Negative and positive affect were assessed before and after the TSST, and vagally mediated heart rate variability (HRV) was assessed across baseline, stress anticipation, and recovery in a subsample of 70 participants. In preregistered analyses, meditators reported lower post-stress negative affect (ηp2 = .05) and higher post-stress positive affect (ηp2 = .04) than controls after accounting for pre-stress affect, age, and gender. Meditators’ lower emotion-regulation difficulties accounted for their lower negative and higher positive affect before the stressor but not for group differences in affective change. In contrast, meditators and controls did not differ in HRV, either overall or across TSST phases, with Bayesian analyses providing strong to extreme evidence for the absence of group effects (BF01 > 14). In exploratory analyses, meditators reported fewer and less severe stressors over the past year despite comparable lifetime stressor exposure. Long-term meditation was thus associated with modestly more favourable affective, but not autonomic, responses to an acute psychosocial stressor. The stress-buffering benefits associated with long-term meditation may therefore operate less through attenuated reactivity to acute stressors and more through processes that reduce stressor exposure or facilitate recovery in daily life.