Meditation & Emotion
Meditators sometimes identify the negative emotions they are feeling in order to free themselves of them, and brain scans have recently shown that this process calms the part of the brain associated with emotional processing.
Matthew Lieberman hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging machines, & asked them to look at pictures of faces making emotional expressions. Below some of the photos was a choice of words describing the emotion — such as “angry” or “fearful” — or 2 possible names for the people in the pictures, one male name and one female name.
When the participants chose labels for the negative emotions, activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region — an area associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences — became more active, whereas activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional processing, was calmed.
By contrast, when the subjects picked appropriate names for the faces, the brain scans revealed none of these changes — indicating that only emotional labeling makes a difference.
“In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses,” Lieberman said.
In a second experiment, 27 of the same subjects completed questionnaires to determine how “mindful” they are.
Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”
When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference — the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions.