The behavior effect of meditation

Abstract

Affective regulation is fundamental to mental well-being. The dysregulation of affective functioning can lead to an array of psychological disorders leading to the incurrence of enormous costs both socio-economically and in terms of the collective psychological well-being of societies. Therefore, a pressing need exists for cost-effective behavioral strategies that help to prevent or perhaps intervene in affective dysregulation in order to better the overall mental health in society. With aging populations worldwide, it is well documented that age-related degenerative changes in the brain cause cognitive decline and affective dysregulation. Here, we propose a timely project that examines how a behavioral strategy— meditation—may help to promote the psychological wellbeing of older people. Meditation is a form of mental practice originating from Sino-Hindu cultures. In recent years, meditation has emerged as a popular practice amongst people from various ethnicities and cultures, largely due to its convenience. Hence, it has become one of the most rigorously studied behavioral strategies due to its promising potential to impact affective regulation.

This thesis contains the report of a longitudinal study on the affective effect of an eight-week meditation training on a group of 43 older participants randomly assigned to the meditation (n=23; 16 females and 7 males; age: M = 64.78 years, s.d. = 2.71) and active control (relaxation training) (n=21; 13 females and 8 males; age: M = 64.62 years, s.d. = 2.22) groups. These older participants were tracked from before they started the training (pre-training measurement) to when they completed the 24 training sessions (post-training measurement). The findings showed a significant reduction in the perceived valence and arousal of the presented affective stimuli, suggesting that short-term meditation training could have an effect on boosting affective regulation presented as dampening the valence and arousal effects of affective inputs from the environment. The project findings contribute significantly to our theoretical understanding of the behavioral underpinnings of how meditation affects affective functioning. Meditation, being a practically convenient mental exercise that has been very well received by people across different ethnic and cultural groups, has the strong potential to be incorporated into cost-effective public intervention programs that seek to promote healthy aging, which will have a critical and far-reaching impact on the wellbeing of the old-age population.