When less is more: mindfulness predicts adaptive affective responding to rejection via reduced prefrontal recruitment

Abstract

Social rejection is a distressing and painful event that many people must cope with on a frequent basis. Mindfulness—defined here as a mental state of receptive attentiveness to internal and external stimuli as they arise, moment-to-moment—may buffer such social distress. However, little research indicates whether mindful individuals adaptively regulate the distress of rejection—or the neural mechanisms underlying this potential capacity. To fill these gaps in the literature, participants reported their trait mindfulness and then completed a social rejection paradigm (Cyberball) while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Approximately 1 hour after the rejection incident, participants reported their level of distress during rejection (i.e. social distress). Mindfulness was associated with less distress during rejection. This relation was mediated by lower activation in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during the rejection incident, a brain region reliably associated with the inhibition of negative affect. Mindfulness was also correlated with less functional connectivity between the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the bilateral amygdala and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which play a critical role in the generation of social distress. Mindfulness may relate to effective coping with rejection by not over-activating top-down regulatory mechanisms, potentially resulting in more effective long-term emotion-regulation.

Effects of Mindfulness Training on Emotion Regulation in Patients With Depression: Reduced Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Activation Indexes Early Beneficial Changes

“…While it remained untested in our study whether our sample did indeed show such dlPFC deficits at baseline, the current findings point towards the possibility that mindfulness training may foster more effective emotion-regulation in depression by countering characteristic tendencies towards excessive or ineffective dlPFC engagement. This observation is in line with recent imaging research in healthy participants indicating that trait mindfulness is associated with reduced recruitment of cognitive control regions during regulation of negative emotions 70 .…”

Pathways to well-being: Untangling the causal relationships among biopsychosocial variables

“…Further, considering that the SàB pathway is mediated through psychological factors, addressing psychological factors can be beneficial when social circumstances are difficult to change. A recent experimental study found that individuals' trait mindfulness predicted less distress following a social rejection incident (Martelli et al, 2018). Other studies also indicate that mindfulness training may buffer social distress (Keng et al, 2013;Lindsay et al, 2019;Roemer et al, 2015).…”

Alterations of Regional Homogeneity and Functional Connectivity Following Short-Term Mindfulness Meditation in Healthy Volunteers

“…Furthermore, a negative correlation between brain activations in prefrontal and right insula and mindfulness when viewing negative pictures suggests that less regulatory resources are needed in mindful individuals when facing emotional arousal (Lutz et al, 2014). Meditation training may also influence affective responses through amygdala reactivity, or connections among those regions (Herwig et al, 2018; Martelli et al, 2018; Tra et al, 2018).…”