Neuroscientists from Michigan State University
(MSU) have now presented
clinical data suggesting the practice of mindfulness can help anyone deal with
intensely emotional situations in a calm and balanced way, whether they are
‘naturals’ at meditation or undergo a crash course.
‘Our findings not only demonstrate that meditation
improves emotional health, but that people can acquire these benefits
regardless of their ‘natural’ ability to be mindful,’ said Dr Yanli Lin, lead
author on the study. ‘It just takes some practice.’
The team asked 68 participants to either listen to
an 18-minute audio meditation guide or a control presentation on learning a new
language. Each person was then shown upsetting images, including photos of
corpses, while hooked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) which recorded their
brain activity. All participants were female; the authors argued this meant
they did not have to account for gender differences relating to regulating emotions.
The resulting scans showed ‘a significant reduction
in LPP response to negative stimuli over time’, the authors wrote in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. LPP stands for ‘late positive potential’, and refers
to emotion-related activity in the brain’s visual cortex and how it is
processed.
Previous studies have
shown that LPP ‘reflects a global inhibition of activity in visual cortex,
resulting in the selective survival of activity associated with the processing
of the emotional stimulus’. It is part of an emotional coping mechanism, and in
this study it was argued that it proved those who meditated could control their
negative emotions and recover quickly.
The Michigan team found the results in the group
that meditated were similar to those found in prior studies on ‘naturally
mindful’ people, ‘suggesting that the benefits of mindfulness can be cultivated
through practice’.
It seems that, like most other things, practice is the key to success. In that
regard, the researchers found that when individuals were specifically
instructed to ‘be mindful’, when looking at the distressing photos, the LPP was
not impacted at all, ‘indicating that deliberate engagement in [a] state [of] mindfulness
may not be an effective form of emotion regulation in meditation novices’.
Study: Lin, Y
et al. ‘Deconstructing the Emotion Regulatory Properties of
Mindfulness: An Electrophysiological Investigation.’ Front.
Hum. Neurosci. 07
September 2016 | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00451
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