Effects of long-term meditation practice on attentional biases towards emotional faces: An eye-tracking study.

Attentional biases towards affective stimuli reflect an individual balance of appetitive and aversive motivational systems. Vigilance in relation to threatening information reflects emotional imbalance, associated with affective and somatic problems. It is known that meditation practice significantly improves control of attention, which is considered to be a tool for adaptive emotional regulation. In this regard, the main aim of the present study was to evaluate the influence of meditation on attentional bias towards neutral and emotional facial expressions. Eyes were tracked while 21 healthy controls and 23 experienced meditators (all males) viewed displays consisting of four facial expressions (neutral, angry, fearful and happy) for 10 s. Measures of biases in initial orienting and maintenance of attention were assessed. No effects were found for initial orienting biases. Meditators spent significantly less time viewing angry and fearful faces than control subjects. Furthermore, meditators selectively attended to happy faces whereas control subjects showed attentional biases towards both angry and happy faces. In sum we can conclude that long-term meditation practice adaptively affects attentional biases towards motivationally significant stimuli and that these biases reflect positive mood and predominance of appetitive motivation.

Contribution of neurophysiological endophenotype, individual frequency of EEG alpha oscillations, to mechanisms of emotional reactivity.

We studied the relationship between individual alpha frequency (IAF) of EEG (neurophysiological endophenotype reflecting individual predisposition to efficacious cognitive and creative activity) and individual emotional reactivity. The psychophysiological study included healthy men in two models of evoked emotions - anxious apprehension (awaiting of inescapable aversive punishment) and discrete (opposite) emotions. Analysis of self-report, multichannel EEG, galvanic skin response, and cardiovascular reactivity showed that individuals with high IAF are characterized by predominance of parasympathetic influences in autonomic regulation circuit, proactive strategies of coping with inescapable threat, higher activity of positive emotional attitude and availability of memory traces about positive experience. Individuals with low IAF demonstrate predominance of sympathetic influences and maladaptive avoidance-like coping with inescapable threat and insufficiency of positive emotional activation mechanisms. It is suggested that IAF participates in the formation of individual emotional space and strategies of coping with emotional challenges.