Dealing with strong emotions in a complex world

This leads me into the discussion of a nice scientific article I've been wanting to blog about for a while now: "Impact of mindfulness on the neural responses to emotional pictures in experienced and beginner meditators". While a lot of scientific research has focused on the effects meditation has on attention and cognition, I feel like probably a much more important effect of meditation is that on emotional reactivity. Luckily, this study addresses that. The authors induced emotions in their participants by having them look at a set of pictures designed to arouse emotions. These pictures include some very horrific war scenes, but also wonderful pictures of cuddly animals etc. The scientists wanted to contrast emotional reactions to these pictures, and at the same time studied neural activity of these participants during their reactions. This neural activity could then be used to say something about how people regulated their emotional responses. The scientists predicted that this mechanism of emotion regulation would differ between novices and experienced meditators. If course one should exercise extreme caution inferring cognitive processes from brain activity (an activity termed "reverse inference"), but at least it can lead to hypotheses to be tested in follow-up experiments.

The scientists found that when in meditation, their participants showed a less intense emotional reaction, at least according to their self-report. What was interesting then was comparing their brains in a meditative versus a baseline state. The scientists found that beginning meditators had a lot of activation in brain areas typically associated with emotions and emotion regulation, such as the amygdala and the right insula. Experienced meditators almost did not show any particular brain activation that changed between the meditative and neutral states. However, the experienced meditators exhibited a consistently lower activation in the posterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex, areas that have typically been associated with mind-wandering. The scientists interpreted this as follows: beginning meditators still have to actively suppress some emotions and need a lot of activation of emotion-regulation areas for this. For experienced meditators, reduced emotional intensity during the meditative state is simply a result of a decrease in mind-wandering.

So what does this mean? Although a lot of research still has to be done, I feel this comprises some scientific evidence for a role of meditation practice in emotion regulation. Actually, a recent paper used a very interesting approach to arrive at similar conclusions. They showed that in participants whose self-regulation was improved by a mindfulness-based smoking cessation intervention, their heart-rate variability increased in the meditative state. Increased heart-rate variability has also been found to be an indicator of self-regulation. So maybe my meditation practice was the factor that helped me in the past week deal with a nagging co-author and with delayed trains...