{"id":1428,"date":"2014-05-10T18:06:53","date_gmt":"2014-05-10T22:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=1428"},"modified":"2017-09-06T13:33:36","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T17:33:36","slug":"can-loving-kindness-meditation-increase-positive-affect-and-attentional-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2014\/05\/10\/can-loving-kindness-meditation-increase-positive-affect-and-attentional-control\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Loving-Kindness Meditation Increase Positive Affect and Attentional Control?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"grumpy<\/a><\/p>\n

Finals period: a time when we question our life choices. \u201cWhy didn\u2019t I start studying for this test last week?\u201d \u201cWhy did I start writing this essay the day before it is due?\u201d By finals period, most of us are already pretty burnt out from the semester and it can become increasingly difficult to concentrate on work. As Jim Terhune mentioned in his last email to Colby students, we often feel grumpier around this time of year. Recent research in the field of psychology suggests that practicing loving-kindness meditation may actually improve our ability to form positive attitudes and to control attention, a much needed cognitive resource during finals period.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Meditation, historically used in Eastern spiritual practices, has recently become more popular in Western culture. Although it does not have a universally accepted definition, meditation in psychology research usually refers to a mind-body practice that focuses on attention, awareness, and self-regulation. Recent research suggests that meditation may lead to more positive health outcomes, such as better immune functioning and greater psychological well-being (Kok et al., 2013). Mental health professionals have even started to incorporate meditation into their treatment programs. For example, Jon Kabat-Zinn developed a cognitive behavioral therapy program, called Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), based on mindfulness meditation, body awareness, and yoga. Even though much of the research focuses on mindfulness meditation, some research has found a relationship between loving-kindness meditation and positive health outcomes (Kok et al., 2013).<\/p>\n

\"Loving-Kindness-meditation\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Loving-kindness meditation specifically encourages positive affect toward the self and others. Affect refers to the physiological and psychological experience of emotions and positive affect is associated with positive health outcomes, such as decreased pain (Cohen & Pressman, 2006). Loving-kindness meditation may also impact affective learning, which occurs when repeated exposure to a neutral stimulus creates a positive or negative association with that stimulus. In other words, affective learning refers to the formation of positive or negative attitudes toward previously neutral stimuli. For example, Cacioppo et al. found that negative attitudes toward pronounceable, non-word stimuli can be learned through classical conditioning (1992).<\/p>\n

Loving-kindness meditation may also impact our ability to control attentional resources. Attention deals with the selection of certain stimuli in the environment and the concentration of our cognitive resources on those stimuli. The idea of selective attention suggests that we can concentrate on a certain stimulus while ignoring other stimuli in the environment; divided attention suggests that we can also divide our attention between several different stimuli. Filter theories explain the process of selective attention by comparing it to a filter that sifts through stimuli either before (early selection) or after (late selection) perception. The theory of attenuation explains attention as a radio that turns down the volume of sensory signal strength from unimportant stimuli in the environment (Kellogg 2007).<\/p>\n

Hunsinger et al. found that loving-kindness meditation positively impacted the ability to form positive attitudes and the ability to control attention (2012). 97 undergraduate students from a New England University completed two tasks: ideograph-pairings, which measured affective learning, and the beloved Stroop test, which measured cognitive control. For the first task, Hunsinger et al. (2012) paired 9 Chinese ideographs with positive, negative, or neutral pictures and asked participants to rate how much they liked each ideograph (1-7 scale) after ten exposures. The second task consisted of compatible and incompatible trials of the color-naming Stroop task. In the compatible trials, the words \u201cred\u201d and \u201cgreen\u201d were presented in their respective hues against a white background. In the incompatible trials, the same words were presented in opposing hues. Participants were told to press the key (red or green) that corresponded with the presented hue, so more cognitive control was needed for the incompatible trials because they needed to ignore the sensory input of the words and instead process the semantic meaning.<\/p>\n

\"Stroop<\/a><\/p>\n

The participants in the loving-kindness meditation group completed three 20-minute guided meditation sessions, which trained them on associating a positive affect with specific family members and friends. Hunsinger et al. (2012) found that the loving-kindness meditation impacted performance on both tasks. The participants who were trained in loving-kindness meditation associated more positivity, but not negativity, with the ideographs in task one. These participants also performed better on the Stroop test. They correctly categorized words faster than the control group during both the compatible and the incompatible trials. In fact, their response times for the two types of trials were closer together, which means that the mismatch between hue and word did not impact their responses as much as it impacted the responses in the control group.<\/p>\n

The results of this study suggest that even short-term training in loving-kindness meditation may influence our affective learning and attentional control. Since loving-kindness meditation encourages positive attitudes towards neutral, and even negative, stimuli, even a short amount of training may effectively increase our ability to form positive attitudes. This type of meditation also improves one\u2019s ability to control attention, so training may either help to lower the volume of distracting stimuli in the attenuation model or help to sift through the distracting stimuli in the filter theories. Future research should look into how students could benefit from loving-kindness meditation in educational settings. Perhaps training students and practicing it regularly in school could improve their control of the attentional resources that are so crucial for learning in the classroom. Could 20 minutes of loving-kindness meditation each day during finals week help Colby students control their attention to better study for exams? These findings suggest that our affect and cognition may benefit from it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n

Cohen, S., & Pressman, S. D. (2006). Positive Affect and Health. Current Directions in Psychological Science<\/i>, 15.3, 122-125. <\/i><\/p>\n

Hunsinger, M., Livingston, R., & Isbell, L. (2013). The impact of loving-kindness meditation on affective learning and cognitive control. Mindfulness<\/i>, 4, 275-280.<\/p>\n

Kellogg, R. T. (2007). Attention. \u00a0Fundamentals of cognitive psychology<\/i>. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications.<\/p>\n

Kok, B. E., Waugh, C. E., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). Meditation and Health: The Search for Mechanisms of Action. Social and Personality Psychology Compass<\/i>, 7.1, 27-39.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finals period: a time when we question our life choices. \u201cWhy didn\u2019t I start studying for this test last week?\u201d \u201cWhy did I start writing this essay the day before it is due?\u201d By finals period, most of us are already pretty burnt out from the semester and it can become increasingly difficult to concentrate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3185,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80216],"tags":[149745,4073],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3185"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1428"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3810,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions\/3810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}