Repetitive Religious Chanting Modulates the Late-Stage Brain Response to Fear- and Stress-Provoking Pictures

Abstract

Chanting and praying are among the most popular religious activities, which are said to be able to alleviate people’s negative emotions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this mental exercise and its temporal course have hardly been investigated. Here, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the effects of chanting the name of a Buddha (Amitābha) on the brain’s response to viewing negative pictures that were fear- and stress-provoking. We recorded and analyzed electroencephalography (EEG) data from 21 Buddhists with chanting experience as they viewed negative and neutral pictures. Participants were instructed to chant the names of Amitābha or Santa Claus silently to themselves or simply remain silent (no-chanting condition) during picture viewing. To measure the physiological changes corresponding to negative emotions, electrocardiogram and galvanic skin response data were also collected. Results showed that viewing negative pictures (vs. neutral pictures) increased the amplitude of the N1 component in all the chanting conditions. The amplitude of late positive potential (LPP) also increased when the negative pictures were viewed under the no-chanting and the Santa Claus condition. However, increased LPP was not observed when chanting Amitābha. The ERP source analysis confirmed this finding and showed that increased LPP mainly originated from the central-parietal regions of the brain. In addition, the participants’ heart rates decreased significantly when viewing negative pictures in the Santa Claus condition. The no-chanting condition had a similar decreasing trend although not significant. However, while chanting Amitābha and viewing negative pictures participants’ heart rate did not differ significantly from that observed during neutral picture viewing. It is possible that the chanting of Amitābha might have helped the participants to develop a religious schema and neutralized the effect of the negative stimuli. These findings echo similar research findings on Christian religious practices and brain responses to negative stimuli. Hence, prayer/religious practices may have cross-cultural universality in emotion regulation. This study shows for the first time that Buddhist chanting, or in a broader sense, repetition of religious prayers will not modulate brain responses to negative stimuli during the early perceptual stage, but only during the late-stage emotional/cognitive processing.

Repetitive Religious Chanting Invokes Positive Emotional Schema to Counterbalance Fear: A Multi-Modal Functional and Structural MRI Study

“…These patterns are particularly noticeable when participants are confronted with fearful events of negative valence. This finding is in line with a previous ERP study, which showed significant differences between RC and NRC during emotion regulation (Gao et al, 2017). The major involvement of subcortical regions, including the amygdala, para-hippocampus, and brainstem (pons) illustrate that RC can influence the function of these emotion-related brain regions in a direct manner.…”

“…The fMRI experiment on emotion regulation followed a previous ERP experiment (Gao et al, 2017). It had a 2 × 3 factorial design with two factors (emotion and chanting), featuring two levels for emotion (neutral and fear) and three levels for chanting (religious chanting, non-religious chanting and no chanting).…”

“…This ensured the suitability of the chanting for inducing and sustaining the corresponding prayerlike state during the subsequent emotion regulation period. For further methodological details, please refer to a previous study using the same paradigm (Gao et al, 2017).…”

“…In contrast to mindfulness, RC is sometimes accompanied by religious awe, an overwhelming feeling with a supernatural element (Van Cappellen and Saroglou, 2012), that indicates that RC may have a unique feature related to emotion regulation. In exploring traditional and effective methods of emotion regulation, previous event-related potential (ERP) study showed that RC of Amitābha Buddha tends to reduce the late positive potential (LPP) induced by fear-and stress-provoking pictures (Gao et al, 2017). However, affective processing relies on subcortical brain regions, such as the amygdala, whereas ERPs can only measure brain activity on the surface of the scalp.…”

Is reappraisal always effective in modifying emotional reactions in females? The role of regulatory timing and goals

“…LPP is a broad positive component sensitive to the motivational relevance of visual stimuli (Cuthbert, Schupp, Bradley, Birbaumer, & Lang, 2000;Schupp, Junghofer, Weike, & Hamm, 2004;Schupp et al, 2000). The previous studies Gao et al, 2017;Moser et al, 2009;Zhang et al, 2012Zhang et al, , 2013 suggested that the central-parietal and parietal LPP in general was associated with emotional significance of stimuli, the more positive parietal LPP indicating the enhancement in emotional intensity and the more negative parietal LPP indicating the decrease in emotional intensity. However, several recent studies found higher frontal LPP under reappraisal relative to the viewing condition and argued that enhanced frontal LPP may index increased cognitive effort associated with reappraisal (Bernat, Cadwallader, Seo, Vizueta, & Patrick, 2011;Moser, Hartwig, Moran, Jendrusina, & Kross, 2014;Shafir, Schwartz, Blechert, & Sheppes, 2015).…”