Publication: Brain activation changes during negative emotion regulation task following brief mindfulness exercise. an fmri study
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Date
2022-05
Authors
Vijayakumar, Kavishashree
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Abstract
Introduction: Mindfulness enhances mental health by promoting adaptive emotional control responses. Mindfulness is linked to emotion control since it needs a nonreactive awareness and acceptance of current circumstances. Objective: This study aims to measure the changes in negative emotion regulation task and the associated brain activation following a brief audio mindfulness exercise and a brief audiobook exercise. Methods: Six participants (2 male and 4 female) between the ages of 19 and 34 (mean = 24, SD = 2.19) participated in this study. The neurotechnology used is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Brief mindfulness intervention for 15 minutes was carried out after the pre-emotion regulation task where participants responded to emotionally valent negative and neutral words, A post emotion regulation task was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the brief mindfulness intervention. The negative and neutral word stimuli used in this study were extracted from Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW). We used self-reporting questionnaires such as PANAS-X and MAAS Malay version to measure emotion and mindfulness. Results: Repeated measure ANOVA was carried out for between-group differences (treatment effect), between-group differences based on time (time-treatment interaction effect) and within-group changes (time effect) for PANAS-X scores and reaction time of the negative and neutral visual stimuli. Independent sample t-test was carried out to analyze the activated brain regions in the conjunction analysis. The p-value used in these statistical tests was uncorrected < 0.05 for all three objectives. The commonly activated regions between both the mindfulness and audiobook groups are the left precentral gyrus, left postcentral gyrus, left cuneus, and left middle occipital gyrus for negative stimuli. As revealed from the study’s findings, mindfulness exercise enhances emotion regulation by showing less negative emotion trait as seen from PANAS-X score. Participants showed more positive emotion in the post-PANAS-X scoring. However, the results of the PANAS-X score and Reaction Time did not yield statistically significant results but a medium and large effect size prominently were identified for both the mindfulness and audiobook group. Conclusion: As revealed from the study’s findings, mindfulness exercise enhances emotion regulation by showing less negative emotion trait as seen from PANAS-X and Reaction Time results. Participants showed more positive emotion in the post PANAS-X scoring compared to the pretesting and participants also responded at a faster rate compared to the pretesting reaction time score. Audiobook and mindfulness groups showed common regions that are responsible for voluntary motor movements, proprioception, generation and regulation of emotions, visual information, and mindfulness. Although the mindfulness intervention was given for only 15 minutes, brain activation were able to be identified
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