Awareness of subtle emotional feelings: a comparison of long-term meditators and nonmeditators.
The authors explored whether meditation training to enhance emotional awareness improves discrimination of subtle emotional feelings hypothesized to guide decision-making. Long-term meditators and nonmeditators were compared on measures of self-reported valence and arousal, skin conductance response (SCR), and facial electromyography (EMG) to masked and nonmasked emotional pictures, and on measures of heartbeat detection and self-reported emotional awareness. Groups responded similarly to nonmasked pictures. In the masked condition, only controls showed discrimination in valence self-reports. However, meditators reported greater emotional clarity than controls, and meditators with higher clarity had reduced arousal and improved valence discrimination in the masked condition. These findings provide qualified support for the somatic marker hypothesis and suggest that meditation may influence how emotionally ambiguous information is processed, regulated, and represented in conscious awareness.
Nielsen
Lisbeth
L
Behavioral and Social Research Program, National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA. nielsenli@nia.nih.gov
Kaszniak
Alfred W
AW
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology; D004576:Electromyography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response / Q000502:physiology; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D019545:Intuition / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D019122:Meditation / Q000523:psychology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology; D010555:Personality Inventory; D011603:Psychophysiology; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological