One of main benefits of mindfulness meditation is emotion regulation. A brain imaging study revealed that mindfulness meditation may enhance the capacity to regulate people's emotion.
Here is the abstract of the study:
Objective: Mindfulness is a process whereby one is aware and receptive to present moment experiences. Although mindfulness enhancing interventions reduce pathological mental and physical health symptoms across a wide variety of conditions and diseases, the mechanisms underlying these effects remain unknown. Converging evidence from the mindfulness and neuroscience literature suggests that labeling affect may be one mechanism for these effects.
Methods: Participants (n27) indicated trait levels of mindfulness and then completed an affect labeling task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The labeling task consisted of matching facial expressions to appropriate affect words (affect labeling) or to gender-appropriate names (gender labeling control task).
Results: After controlling for multiple individual difference measures, dispositional mindfulness was associated with greater widespread prefrontal cortical activation, and reduced bilateral amygdala activity during affect labeling, compared with the gender labeling control task. Further, strong negative associations were found between areas of prefrontal cortex and right amygdala responses in participants high in mindfulness but not in participants low in mindfulness.
Conclusions: The present findings with a dispositional measure of mindfulness suggest one potential neurocognitive mechanism for understanding how mindfulness meditation interventions reduce negative affect and improve health outcomes, showing that mindfulness is associated with enhanced prefrontal cortical regulation of affect through labeling of negative affective stimuli.
Key words: fMRI, mindfulness, emotion regulation, neuroscience, meditation, negative affect.
The skillful use of labeling during satipatthana [mindful] contemplation can help strengthen clear recognition and understanding. At the same time, labeling introduces a healthy degree of inner detachment, since the act of apostrophizing one’s moods and emotions diminishes one’s identification with them.
Analayo, from Satipatthana
And, here are their conclusion:
The present findings are part of the first efforts in understanding the neurocognitive underpinnings of mindfulness and identifying the neural pathways that link mindfulness with improved psychological and physical well-being. These findings
connect historical accounts of the Buddha’s first teachings mindfulness over two millennia ago with contemporary findings in affective and cognitive neuroscience suggesting that mindfulness may reduce negative affect and promote greater physical health, in part, through labeling one’s feelings.
Link to the research PDF paper: Creswell, J. D., Way, B. M., Eisenberger, N. I., & Lieberman, M. D. (2007). Neural correlates of dispositional mindfulness during affect labeling. Psychosomatic Medicine, 69, 560-565.
Link to the news: UCLA Psychology Study finds Resonance with Buddhist Teachings
0 comments:
Post a Comment