Differential effects of state and trait mindfulness on the late positive potential.

Abstract

Mindfulness is an effective emotion regulation strategy, and its principles have formed the basis for several psychotherapies. Of interest is how a mindful perspective changes not only the subjective experience of emotion, but also neural activity involved in emotional processing. In a previous event-related potential (ERP) study, trait mindfulness was linked with reduced neural activity in response to affective stimuli, as measured by the late positive potential (LPP). Building on this result, we investigated how both state (i.e., task-induced) and trait mindfulness would jointly affect the LPP in a large adult sample (N = 118). First, participants passively viewed affective images while ERP data were recorded. Participants were then instructed to adopt a mindful perspective and viewed a second, equivalent set of images. We hypothesized that the LPP would be reduced from the passive viewing to the mindful viewing condition. Contrary to our hypothesis, task-induced mindfulness increased LPP amplitude relative to passive viewing across all image types, suggesting that state mindfulness increases motivated attention to stimuli, regardless of affective valence and arousal. Trait mindfulness did not correlate with LPP amplitude in either the passive or mindful viewing conditions. As an unexpected finding, gender moderated the association between trait mindfulness and LPP amplitude to emotional images during mindful viewing. We propose that state and trait mindfulness impact emotional processing through different neural mechanisms and discuss implications for mindfulness as an emotion regulation strategy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Towards a refined mindfulness model related to consciousness and based on ERP

“…However, the effect was not observed in the case of a task-induced state of mindfulness, where participants were instructed to pay attention to emotional stimuli with a mindful mindset. In this case, an increase in emotional response (Egan et al, 2018;Uusberg et al, 2016) or a lack of change has been reported (Lin et al, 2016). These mixed findings suggest that outcomes could be a function of the experimental context.…”

“…On the other hand, mindfulness was associated with higher LPP amplitude in two studies (Egan, Hill, & Foti, 2018;Uusberg, Uusberg, Talpsep, & Paaver, 2016), and three studies reported no effect (Cosme & Wiens, 2015;Ho, Sun, Ting, Chan, & Lee, 2015;Lin et al, 2016). It should be noted that two studies found a mixed effect of mindfulness on the LPP component, depending on the experimental condition (dispositional mindfulness, meditative state or MM intervention) (Egan et al, 2018;Lin et al, 2016).…”

“…(i) higher dispositional mindfulness was associated with lower LPP amplitude (Brown et al, 2013;Lin et al, 2016), (ii) LPP amplitude was lower in experienced compared to naïve meditators (Sobolewski et al, 2011), and (iii) MM interventions in a healthy population were associated with a decrease in LPP amplitude (Lin et al, 2016). On the other hand, mindfulness was associated with higher LPP amplitude in two studies (Egan, Hill, & Foti, 2018;Uusberg, Uusberg, Talpsep, & Paaver, 2016), and three studies reported no effect (Cosme & Wiens, 2015;Ho, Sun, Ting, Chan, & Lee, 2015;Lin et al, 2016). It should be noted that two studies found a mixed effect of mindfulness on the LPP component, depending on the experimental condition (dispositional mindfulness, meditative state or MM intervention) (Egan et al, 2018;Lin et al, 2016).…”

A Brief Review of the EEG Literature on Mindfulness and Fear Extinction and its Potential Implications for Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms (PTSS)

“…Similarly, findings by Sobolewski, Holt, Kublik, and Wróbel [89] have found meditators to experience lower LPP in response to negative valence stimuli, but were no different from controls in response to positive valence stimuli, suggesting that meditators were better able to regulate negatively arousing emotions. On the other hand, Egan, Hill, and Foti [82] found increased LPP regardless of affective valence and arousal. Egan et al [82] attributed this finding to the nature of their study, such that the brief mindfulness instruction in their study requested participants to focus their attention to external stimuli (pictures on the screen), which would have in turn led to increased LPP to reflect emotional processing of the stimuli to which focus was directed.…”

“…On the other hand, Egan, Hill, and Foti [82] found increased LPP regardless of affective valence and arousal. Egan et al [82] attributed this finding to the nature of their study, such that the brief mindfulness instruction in their study requested participants to focus their attention to external stimuli (pictures on the screen), which would have in turn led to increased LPP to reflect emotional processing of the stimuli to which focus was directed. As such, the ERP findings thus far allude to the role of mindfulness meditation in the motivated allocation of attention resources, which could have important implications for how attention is allocated toward feared stimuli in the context of fear extinction.…”