http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00212/full?
- 1Department of Psychological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA
- 2Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
- 3Institute of Neuroinformatics and Lab for Body and Mind, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
- 4First Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University, Dalian, China
- 5Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
Introduction
Mindfulness meditation has been shown to produce positive effects on psychological wellbeing (Hölzel et al., 2011). As an important benefit of meditation practice, changes in self-reported positive mood or emotion are often observed (Kabat-Zinn et al., 1992; Tang et al., 2007).
In particular, one form of meditation, the integrative body-mind
training (IBMT) that originates from traditional Chinese medicine,
improves attention, self-regulation, and mood after only few hours of
training in comparison with relaxation training in a random assignment
design (Tang et al., 2007; Ding et al., 2014).
Since late 1970s, frontal EEG asymmetry has had
widespread use in measuring individual differences in emotional state.
In general, it is believed a left-sided frontal activation indicates a
positive emotion, although the evidence is not always consistent with
this view (Allen and Kline, 2004; Allen et al., 2004; Cacioppo, 2004; Travis and Arenander, 2004, 2006).
A number of EEG studies have examined the relationship between meditation and frontal asymmetry (Davidson et al., 2003; Moyer et al., 2011).
For example, 8-weeks mindfulness-based stress reduction, in comparison
to a wait-list control, increased left-sided lateralization of alpha
power and decreased negative affect (Davidson et al., 2003).
Another study suggested 5-weeks of meditation shifts EEG asymmetry
toward a pattern associated with positive emotion compared to a
waiting-list control although there was no significant difference
between the two groups (Moyer et al., 2011).
However, previous studies have used EEG with low spatial
resolution and have not involved an active control group. To our
knowledge, only one single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT)
imaging study reported a marginal significant left frontal asymmetry of
cerebral blood flow (CBF) but this study involved a sample of 12
long-term meditators compared to normal controls (Newberg et al., 2010)
and was not a randomized test with an active control. Thus, we set out
to apply brain imaging to investigate the CBF asymmetry induced by
short-term training in a relatively large sample of 40 undergraduates
with a random assignment to IBMT or relaxation training groups. We
hypothesize that IBMT could improve left frontal CBF at resting state,
which may underlie the promotion of positive emotion.
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