User:Gacentenari/sandbox


 * taken from [research on meditation] and made some additions adjustments

Stress reduction
Research has shown stress reduction benefits from mindfulness. A recent study from 2019 tested the effects of meditation on the psychological well-being, work stress, and blood pressure of employees working in the United Kingdom. One group of participants were instructed to meditate once a day using a mindfulness app on their smartphones, while the control group did not engage in meditation. Measurements of well-being, stress, and perceived workplace support were taken for both groups before the intervention and then again after 4 months. Based on self-report questionnaires, the participants that engaged in meditation showed a significant increase in psychological well-being and perceived workplace support. The meditators also reported a significant decrease in anxiety and stress levels.

Other research shows decrease stress levels in people that engage in meditation after shorter periods of time as well. Brief, daily meditation sessions can alter one's behavioral response to stressors, improving coping mechanisms and decreasing the adverse impact caused be stress. A study from 2016 examined anxiety and emotional states of naive meditators before and after a 7-day meditation retreat in Thailand. Results displayed a significant reduction in perceived stress after this traditional Buddhist meditation retreat.

Happiness and emotional well-being
Studies have shown meditators to have higher happiness than control groups, although this may be due to non-specific factors such as meditators having better general self-care.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche has said that neuro scientists have found that with meditation, an individual's happiness baseline can change.

Positive relationships have been found between the volume of gray matter in the right precuneus area of the brain and both meditation and the subject's subjective happiness score. A recent study found that participants who engaged in a body-scan meditation for about 20 minutes self-reported higher levels of happiness and decrease in anxiety compared to participants who just rested during the 20 minute time-span. These results suggest that an increase in awareness of one's body through meditation causes a state of selflessness and a feeling of connectedness. This result then leads to reports of positive emotions.

A technique knowns as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) displays significant benefits towards one's mental health and coping behaviors. Participants who had no prior experience with MBSR reported a significant increase in happiness after 8 weeks of MBSR practice. Focus on the present moment and increased awareness of one's thoughts can help monitor and reduce judgment or negative thoughts, causing a report of higher emotional well-being.

Attention networks and mindfulness meditation
Psychological and Buddhist conceptualisations of mindfulness both highlight awareness and attention training as key components, in which levels of mindfulness can be cultivated with practise of mindfulness meditation. Focused attention meditation (FAM) and open monitoring meditation (OMM) are distinct types of mindfulness meditation; FAM refers to the practice of intently maintaining focus on one object, whereas OMM is the progression of general awareness of one's surroundings while regulating thoughts.

Focused attention meditation is typically practiced first to increase the ability to enhance attentional stability, and awareness of mental states with the goal being to transition to open monitoring meditation practise that emphasizes the ability to monitor moment-by-moment changes in experience, without a focus of attention to maintain. Mindfulness meditation may lead to greater cognitive flexibility.

Selective attention


 * Participants who engaged in the Meditation Breath Attention Score exercise performed better on anagram tasks and reported greater focused attention on this task compared to those who did not undergo this exercise.

executive control attention


 * Participants with at least 6 years of experience meditating performed better on the Stroop Test compared to participants who had not had experience meditating. The group of meditators also had lower reaction times during this test than the group of non-meditators.

Emotion regulation and mindfulness
Research shows meditation practices lead to greater emotional regulation abilities. Mindfulness can help people become more aware of thoughts in the present moment, and this increased self-awareness leads to better processing and control over one's responses to surroundings or circumstances. Positive effects of this heightened awareness include a greater sense of empathy for others, an increase in positive patterns of thinking, and a reduction in anxiety. Reductions in rumination also have been found following mindfulness meditation practice, contributing to the development of positive thinking and emotional well-being.

Evidence of mindfulness and emotion regulation outcomes
Emotional reactivity can be measured and reflected in brain regions related to the production of emotions. It can also be reflected in tests of attentional performance, indexed in poorer performance in attention related tasks.


 * Patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) exhibited reduced amygdala activation in response to negative self-beliefs following an MBSR intervention program that involves mindfulness meditation practise
 * The LPP ERP component indexes arousal and is larger in amplitude for emotionally salient stimuli relative to neutral.  Individuals higher in trait mindfulness showed lower LPP responses to high arousal unpleasant images. These findings suggest that individuals with higher trait mindfulness were better able to regulate emotional reactivity to emotionally evocative stimuli.
 * Participants that completed a 7-week mindfulness training program demonstrated a reduction in a measure of emotional interference (measured as slower responses times following the presentation of emotional relative to neutral pictures). This suggests a reduction in emotional interference.
 * Decreases in social anxiety symptom severity as well as increases in bilateral parietal cortex neural correlates were found following MBSR intervention. This is thought to reflect the increased employment of inhibitory attentional control capacities to regulate emotions
 * Participants who engaged in emotion-focus mediation and breathing meditation exhibited delayed emotional response to negatively valanced film stimuli compared to participants who did not engage in any type of meditation.