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- Title
- From sitting to living : examining the role of meditation in understanding the emotion regulatory mechanisms of mindfulness
- Creator
- Lin, Yanli
- Date
- 2020
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
-
Mindfulness has received widespread interest for its purported benefits to emotional well-being. Despite a rapidly growing literature base supporting the salutary relationship between mindfulness and emotion regulation, little is known about how mindfulness confers its emotion regulatory benefits. A pertinent, yet underexplored, approach to addressing this question is to examine neural mechanisms involved in the effects of mindfulness training via meditative practice to "off-the-cushion"...
Show moreMindfulness has received widespread interest for its purported benefits to emotional well-being. Despite a rapidly growing literature base supporting the salutary relationship between mindfulness and emotion regulation, little is known about how mindfulness confers its emotion regulatory benefits. A pertinent, yet underexplored, approach to addressing this question is to examine neural mechanisms involved in the effects of mindfulness training via meditative practice to "off-the-cushion" changes in emotion regulation. The primary aim of the present study was therefore to determine the extent to which change in neural oscillatory activity (i.e., alpha and theta power) during mindfulness meditation related to subjective (i.e., self-reported negative affect) and neural (i.e., late positive potential [LPP]) measures of emotional reactivity elicited during a subsequent affective picture viewing task. Toward this end, a multimodal experimental paradigm was employed to test three predictions: 1) participants randomized to engage in brief guided mindfulness meditation, relative to those randomized to a control condition, would exhibit increased alpha and theta power during meditation relative to rest; 2) participants in the meditation group, but not those in the control group, would exhibit attenuated LPP responses and report lower negative affect during the picture viewing task; 3) the predicted increases in alpha and theta power during meditation would correlate with the predicted reductions in the LPP and self-reported negative affect during picture viewing. Contrary to expectations, the guided meditation did not produce demonstrable effects on alpha and theta power, the LPP, or self-reported negative affect relative to the control condition. Change in theta, but not alpha, power during meditation was, however, positively correlated with the early time window of the LPP, suggesting that change in neural activity during meditation may relate to subsequent emotion processing. Overall, the study demonstrated the utility of investigating the relationship between what occurs during mindfulness meditation and its purported effects on emotion regulation. Moreover, reflections on the unexpected nature of the null findings dovetail with the prevailing consensus that theoretical and methodological factors unique to the construct of mindfulness are integral in shaping the direction, design, and interpretability of mindfulness research.
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- Title
- The role of hand of error and stimulus orientation in the relationship between worry and error-related brain activity : implications for theory and measurement
- Creator
- Lin, Yanli
- Date
- 2015
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
-
Anxious apprehension/worry is associated with exaggerated error monitoring; however, the precise mechanisms underlying this relationship remain unclear. The current study tested the hypothesis that the error monitoring-worry relationship involves left-lateralized linguistic brain activity by examining the relationship between worry and error monitoring, indexed by the error-related negativity (ERN), as a function of hand of error (Experiment 1) and stimulus orientation (Experiment 2). Results...
Show moreAnxious apprehension/worry is associated with exaggerated error monitoring; however, the precise mechanisms underlying this relationship remain unclear. The current study tested the hypothesis that the error monitoring-worry relationship involves left-lateralized linguistic brain activity by examining the relationship between worry and error monitoring, indexed by the error-related negativity (ERN), as a function of hand of error (Experiment 1) and stimulus orientation (Experiment 2). Results revealed that worry was exclusively related to the ERN on right-handed errors committed by the linguistically dominant left hemisphere. Moreover, the right-hand ERN-worry relationship emerged only when stimuli were presented horizontally (known to activate verbal processes) but not vertically. Together, these findings suggest that the worry-ERN relationship involves left hemisphere verbal processing, elucidating a potential mechanism to explain error monitoring abnormalities in anxiety. Implications for theory and measurement are discussed.
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