Mindfulness Meditation Improves Musical Aesthetic Emotion Processing in Young Adults.

Xiaolin Liu,Huijuan Shi,Hong Yuan,Maoping Zheng,Yong Liu

doi:10.3390/ijerph182413045

Xiaolin Liu, Huijuan Shi + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182413045

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Abstract

This study explored the behavioral and neural correlates of mindfulness meditation improvement in musical aesthetic emotion processing (MAEP) in young adults, using the revised across-modal priming paradigm. Sixty-two participants were selected from 652 college students who assessed their mindfulness traits using the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS). According to the 27% ratio of the high and low total scores, participants were divided into two subgroups: high trait group (n = 31) and low trait group (n = 31). Participants underwent facial recognition and emotional arousal tasks while listening to music, and simultaneously recorded event-related potentials (ERPs). The N400, P3, and late positive component (LPC) were investigated. The behavioral results showed that mindfulness meditation improved executive control abilities in emotional face processing and effectively regulated the emotional arousal of repeated listening to familiar music among young adults. These improvements were associated with positive changes in key neural signatures of facial recognition (smaller P3 and larger LPC effects) and emotional arousal (smaller N400 and larger LPC effects). Our results show that P3, N400, and LPC are important neural markers for the improvement of executive control and regulating emotional arousal in musical aesthetic emotion processing, providing new evidence for exploring attention training and emotional processing. We revised the affecting priming paradigm and E-prime 3.0 procedure to fulfill the simultaneous measurement of music listening and experimental tasks and provide a new experimental paradigm to simultaneously detect the behavioral and neural correlates of mindfulness-based musical aesthetic processing.

Highlights

Enjoying music is a favored artistic experience for human beings, and musical aesthetic processing profoundly impacts human life [1]
The reduction in the N400 amplitudes at central–frontal, central, and central–parietal sites indicates that mindfulness meditation reduces the arousal intensity of individuals with high trait mindfulness and sustains the arousal intensity of individuals with low trait mindfulness
The behavioral performance in facial recognition and emotional arousal tasks and the EEG characteristics of P3, N400, and late positive component (LPC) provide new evidence for people to deeply understand the inner mechanism of mindfulness meditation on the aesthetic emotion processing of individuals with high or low trait mindfulness

Summary

Introduction

Enjoying music is a favored artistic experience for human beings, and musical aesthetic processing profoundly impacts human life [1]. Previous studies have revealed that emotions are the core features of people enjoying music [1,2,7,8]. When individuals are immersed in music, focusing on cognitive-emotional interpretation and judgment, listening to music usually brings an aesthetic experience [9,10,11] and induces positive aesthetic emotions [1,4,7,12,13]. In the study of musical aesthetic emotion processing (MAEP) [5], the aesthetic emotion model [1,7,12,15,17]

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Conclusion