Labeling Emotions Helps Control Them
Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”
When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference—the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions.
“These findings may help explain the beneficial health effects of mindfulness meditation, and suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood and health,” said David Creswell, a UCLA psychologist who led the second part of the study, which will be detailed in Psychosomatic Medicine.
Notes:
An experiment demonstrating the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation in calming emotional states.
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Psychology (0.851326): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
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Buddhist meditation (0.728737): dbpedia | freebase
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Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation WorksSchemas
Science and Meditation
Empirical evidence concerning meditation.
Mental Discipline
Memes on mental discipline, from fictional characters to scientific virtues. 