The effect of explicit expectations on initial meditation experiences.
Although meditation has been employed successfully as a treatment for various stress-related disorders, there is still little evidence clarifying just which aspects of meditation training are responsible for these therapeutic effects. This experiment sought to test the hypothesis that creating two opposite expectations about an initial meditation experience would result in differing physiological and phenomenological responses, even though the same technique was practiced by all subjects. The results of the experiment failed to support this hypothesis.
D001143:Arousal; D001794:Blood Pressure; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response; D006339:Heart Rate; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011897:Random Allocation; D012064:Relaxation Therapy