Transforming negative emotion via religious chanting

Abstract

Emotion plays an important role in learning and negative emotions in daily life can create undesirable impact. Yet, relatively little is done in today’s formal education to teach students how to self regulate emotional response effectively. The Center of Buddhists Studies at the University of Hong Kong has been an leader in integrating training in self regulation with formal school education. In a recent published study, which has been reported by Newsweek, the team of researchers led by Dr. Gao sought to provide direct neuroscience evidence demonstrating that religious chanting by practitioners can effectively neutralize the neural response to fearful pictures. It is assumed that religious chanting helps to construct a positive schema which can form resilience when confronting with stress-provoking stimuli. Implications of this and other related findings in the literature on early education will be discussed.