The Effect Of Meditation On College Students' Emotional Experience And Sensitivity

Originating from the eastern religions and cultural traditions five thousand years ago, meditation had become the major subject of psychological research since 1960s of last century with the evolution of history. Some researchers believe that meditation is a series of practice which aims to build up a special attention mechanism by the individual physical and emotional self-adjustment to ultimately affect the individual mental process. It includes a series of complex emotions and attention regulation training which contribute to enhance the individual sense of happiness, emotional balance, and etc.. Other researchers studied from the behavioral perspective, pointing out that meditation should be an integrated process of three stages, including physical relaxation, breathing regulation and attention concentration, whose core essence is a kind of experience through concentrating on individual inside on purpose.In the extensive field of meditation research, great emphasis had been put on its regulatory effects on emotions and affects. This research was designed to study the influence of meditation training on college students' emotional experience and sensitivity and the change of their a brain waves through the protest and posttest designs of randomized experimental group and control group. The specific procedures were as follows:(1) First of all,62 college students were randomly assigned to experimental group and control group with 31 people on each. The experimenters first collected their relative power of a brain waves when they closed eyes and had a rest before they took part in the experiment, and then they were required to finish three scales (depression, anxiety, the positive and negative affect scale), and to conduct two dimensions' self-assessment of valence and arouse through 30 emotional pictures (from Chinese affective picture system CAPS) as the protest. (2) Then, experimental group subjects participated in meditation practice in training room every day in the next 5 days with each 20 minutes; similarly, control group subjects also went to the training room with each eyes closed for 20 minutes as a rest. (3) Finally, after the fifth meditation practice (or rest), the experimenters re-recorded subjects'relative power of a brain waves, made the subjects complete the 3 scales which were filled in pretest and complete the assessment of emotional pictures (new pictures matched with the valence and arouse in pretest pictures) as the posttest (in order to study the effect of a single meditation practice, the subjects' relative power of a brain waves were also collected before the fifth practice and emotional pictures were assessed, and the obtained data was regarded as the pretest of a single practice). During the fifth practice (rest), the experimenters were responsible for directing and collecting the relative power of a brain wave.The main statistical method was testing paired sample T containing pretest and posttest results which were conducted within each group respectively (the comparison of repeated measures' results within groups used the variance analysis of repeated measures) and testing independent sample T of the difference between the two groups. Among which, in the group difference test, in order to exclude the impact of the subjects baseline, we made the posttest scores of dependent variables minus the pretest scores of corresponding index, and conducted independent sample T test by taking value-added scores as the last difference test scores. The indexes of STAI,PANAS and SDS scales adopted the measurement data of the first meditation (or rest) as the pretest baseline. At the same time, while taking into account the sensitivity and the real-time variability of brain electrical indicators, we classified the pretest baselines of pictures assessment and brain electrical indicators into two occasions before the first meditation (or rest) and the fifth meditation (or rest), which were used to study the overall impact of five practice and the single effect of the fifth meditation. The results showed:(I) After 5 days of meditation training, the scores of subjects' anxiety and depression decreased while negative emotions reduced and positive emotions increased. (2) After 5 days of meditation training, subject's emotional sensitivity to the negative pictures significantly declined, and that to the positive pictures changed little. (3) In the fifth meditation training process, subjects' relative power of a brain waves were significantly increased and this increase could be remained in the five minutes after the practice ended.