Abstract
The ability to effectively direct one’s attention is an important aspect of regulating emotions and a component of mindfulness. Mindfulness practices have been established as effective interventions for mental and physical illness; however, the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness and how they relate to emotional processing have not been explored in depth. The current study used a within-subjects repeated measures design to examine if focused breathing, a brief mindfulness induction, could modulate event-related potentials (ERPs) during emotional image processing relative to a control condition. We related ERP measures of processing positive, negative, and neutral images (the P300 and late positive potential – LPP) to state and trait mindfulness measures. Overall, the brief mindfulness induction condition did not influence ERPs reflecting emotional processing; however, in the brief mindfulness induction condition, those participants who reported feeling more decentered (a subscale of the Toronto Mindfulness Scale) after viewing the images had reduced P300 responses to negative versus neutral images.
Highlights
Mindfulness and EmotionOur everyday lives are influenced by emotion
In the current study we found that a brief mindfulness induction relative to an active control, did not result in reduced eventrelated potentials (ERPs) indices of emotional processing as measured by the P300 and late positive potential (LPP)
We did observe a trend toward a larger LPP for processing positive stimuli in the brief mindfulness induction condition compared to the control condition
Summary
Mindfulness and EmotionOur everyday lives are influenced by emotion. The ability to regulate our emotions and suppress irrelevant emotional distracters is essential for operating in an environment laden with emotionally salient events. The current study examined the neural correlates of focused breathing, an exercise that taps one aspect of mindfulness: the ability to focus one’s attention. From this point forward, we will refer to the mindfulness induction called focused breathing (as describe in previous studies, e.g., Arch and Craske, 2006) as a brief mindfulness induction. We examined if this brief mindfulness induction could alter responses to emotional images, measured by eventrelated potentials (ERPs), relative to a control condition. In addition the current study examined how these ERP responses are related to individual differences in state and trait mindfulness
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