In focus. Mindfulness meditation as emotion regulator

Two recent studies by IIT-Bombay researchers Rashmi Gupta and Surabhi Lodha examine mindfulness meditation and its potential role in regulating emotions and anger.

Mindfulness meditation encompasses cognitive conditioning through techniques such as attentive respiration, body scans, gentle stretching, yoga postures, and mindfulness in everyday tasks.

The study, titled ‘Irrelevant angry, but not happy, faces facilitate response inhibition in mindfulness meditators’, aims “to address the potential interactive role of mindfulness and irrelevant emotional information in response inhibition”.

In the experiment, 58 participants — including 23 who practised ‘mindful meditation’ regularly — were given a simple task, followed by a comprehensive questionnaire.

The task involved pressing a key if the screen said ‘go’ or refraining when it said ‘stop’. Before each prompt, the participants were shown an image of a ‘happy, angry or neutral’ face, which they were asked to ignore.

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The image flashed for 85 milliseconds, while the prompt flashed for 250 milliseconds. The participants were encouraged to respond promptly and accurately to the cues. The survey at the end recorded each participant’s attention and awareness levels, mood and impulsivity, as self-reported by the participants on a scale of 1 to 5.

On average, individuals who regularly practised mindfulness were shown to have greater proficiency in abstaining from pressing the key when prompted with a ‘stop’ signal, compared to the rest. This difference was particularly notable when participants were exposed to an angry face prior to the cues.

The findings indicate that mindfulness practice facilitates swifter processing of negative emotions without compromising on the ability to regulate impulsive responses.

The study says, “Monitoring negative emotions, anger, could be considered an adaptive strategy that individuals acquire from sustained mindfulness practice.”

“The study reveals that mindfulness influences the attention-emotion interface to promote meaning in the face of difficulty,” Gupta told Quantum.

In another study, ‘Are you distracted by pleasure? Practice mindfulness meditation’, the researchers conducted two experiments with 154 participants, of whom some practised mindfulness meditation.

The participants had to locate a specific letter among many arranged in a circle and press a key. Angular letters like H, K, W, M and Z presented a more challenging task compared to others like O.

In some trials, the participants were shown a distracting image in the centre, but were told to ignore it. In the first experiment, the image was of happy or angry faces, while the second experiment had pleasurable (highly arousing) and unpleasant (mutilated) images.

Participants had 1,900 milliseconds to respond. It was found that, on average, the distracting image delayed the response. Those who practised mindful meditation were found better able to ignore positive distractions when the task was challenging.

So, why did negative emotions require greater attentional resources?

Negative emotions, like anger and fear, require more cognitive processing because they are seen as threatening. This can make it harder to shift attention away from them, explains Gupta.

The study, however, has limitations. “Despite including an age-matched control group, individual differences like personality factors might have disposed the individuals towards meditation practice and are responsible for the observed differences between the two groups,” the authors say.