Abstract
While recent studies have explored the maintenance of the effect of meditation on stress resilience, the underlying neural mechanisms have not yet been investigated. The present study conducted a highly controlled residential study of a 4-day meditation intervention to investigate the brain functional changes and long-term effects of meditation on mindfulness and resilience. Thirty participants in meditation practice and 17 participants in a relaxation retreat (control group) underwent magnetic resonance imaging scans at baseline and post-intervention and completed the Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale (CAMS) and Resilience Quotient Test (RQT) at baseline, post-intervention, and the 3-month follow-up. All participants showed increased CAMS and RQT scores post-intervention, but only the meditation group sustained the enhancement after 3 months. Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) between the left rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), precuneus, and angular gyrus was significantly increased post-intervention in the meditation group compared with the relaxation group. The changes in rACC-dmPFC rsFC mediated the relationship between the changes in the CAMS and RQT scores and correlated with the changes in the RQT score both immediately and at 3 months post-intervention. Our findings suggest that increased rACC-dmPFC rsFC via meditation causes an immediate enhancement in resilience that is sustained. Since resilience is known to be associated with the preventative effect of various psychiatric disorders, the improvement in stress-related neural mechanisms may be beneficial to individuals at high clinical risk.
Highlights
Resilience is defined as an individual’s capacity for recovery after significant adversity
There were no significant differences detected between participants with religion and those without religion in terms of changes in rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC)-dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) (t = −0.93, p = 0.36), Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale (CAMS) (t = 0.57, p = 0.57), or Resilience Quotient Test (RQT) (t = 1.70, p = 0.10). This is the first highly controlled residential study to investigate the neural changes via short-term intensive meditation, which is associated with the enhancement and maintenance of resilience
Our results revealed that the default mode network (DMN) was significantly enhanced in the meditation group (MED) group after the intervention compared with that in the control group
Summary
Resilience is defined as an individual’s capacity for recovery after significant adversity. Recent studies have suggested the importance of strengthening individuals’ resilience through appropriate interventions (Padesky and Mooney, 2012; van der Werff et al, 2013; Vanhove et al, 2015) Especially those at risk of mental disorder, enhanced resilience helps protect against. Resilience serves as a framework to promote stable remission in individuals with psychiatric disorders and to attenuate symptom severity in patients with inadequate responses to medication (Segal et al, 2010; Hoge et al, 2013; Waugh and Koster, 2015; Sharma et al, 2016) In this context, meditation has been shown to exert psychological and physiological effects on stress resilience and self-awareness and has been acknowledged as a promising adjunctive treatment in a broad range of psychiatric patients (Rubia, 2009; van der Velden and Roepstorff, 2015). Recent studies have adopted several-day intensive residential meditation retreats designed to maximize training compliance and minimize the effects of non-meditative factors (Tang et al, 2007, 2015; Xue et al, 2011; Hwang et al, 2017)
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