If you have ever been in a stressful situation (such as living through a pandemic), you might have been told by others to try meditation through yoga or other similar practices. In fact, if you were to browse YouTube, search the internet, or visit a bookstore for tips on stress relief, you will surely land on thousands of books and resources on mindfulness, meditation, and the like. Many past studies have found that meditation substantially improves cognitive processes such as attention, executive functioning, and emotional regulation.
What about meditation’s effect on how we view ourselves? After all, humans are hardwired to process information that is self-relevant for evolutionary reasons. We need to pay special attention to information that relates to us, but also be able to stop ruminating excessively to avoid mental exhaustion. How does meditation affect this important process of well-being?
Many past studies have found that long-term meditation training makes one more equanimous or non-reactive to positive and negative emotions. Despite such a neutral experience, meditation practice is also said to help one feel good about oneself. For example, mindfulness training is well-known in reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety, a hallmark of which is heightened negative and reduced positive self-views. So, do long-term meditation practices indeed create substantial and long-lasting neural and behavioral changes in emotional regulation, especially to personally valenced information?
In a paper published in Psychonomic Society journal, Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, Sucharit Katyal, Greg Hajcak, Tamara Flora, Austin Bartlett, and Philippe Goldin examined these questions by comparing long-term meditators (from a Yogic contemplative system where self-transformation is the essential theme of the training) and meditation-naive control participants’ neural activities while performing a self-referential, emotional task.
They recorded participants’ EEG activity during an experimental session where they completed an affective version of the self-referential encoding task (SRET). In a classic SRET, participants have to judge whether a word is self-descriptive or non-self-referential. Participants usually recall self-descriptive words better than non-self-referential words. In the affective version, both pleasant and unpleasant words are used. Healthy adults usually recall more pleasant words, while depressed and anxious participants recall more unpleasant words. In the current paper, participants were shown pleasant and unpleasant words and the task was to indicate whether each word described them or not.
Now to the results. First, long-term meditators self-endorsed fewer unpleasant and more pleasant words than the meditation naive participants. Second, while meditation-naive controls had fewer early-LPP responses (LPP: late-positive-potential; which are implicated in affective encoding, attention, and arousal) to pleasant than unpleasant words, long-term meditators did not show this difference, as shown in the figure below.
Finally, meditators showed a correlation between early-LPP and self-endorsement of more pleasant and fewer unpleasant words, while meditation-naive participants showed the opposite pattern, as shown in the figure below.
Taken together, the authors found evidence that long-term meditators indeed have heightened positive and reduced negative self-views, despite the brain response associated with self-referential processing being neutral. Mediation-naive controls, on the other hand, showed higher brain responses for negative self-views.
These results lend further scientific support to the practice of meditation for the maintenance of well-being and mental health, and highlights the plasticity of the human brain. We have more control in how we respond to valenced stimuli than we might expect. And with extensive meditation and mindfulness training, we might even be able to improve our relationship with ourselves! Now, please take some time and treat yourself to a 5-minute mindfulness meditation session before you tackle the next task on your to-do list.
Featured Psychonomic Society article
Katyal, S., Hajcak, G., Flora, T., Bartlett, A., & Goldin, P. (2020) Event-related potential and behavioural differences in affective self-referential processing in long-term meditators versus controls. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 20, 326–339. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-020-00771-y