EEG Study On Emotional Processing Characteristics Of Long-Term Meditators

Emotion is people’s experience and feeling when facing external stimuli.Obstacles in emotion processing will lead to serious problems such as poor social adaptation.Due to aging and increasing social pressure,the emotional problems of middle-aged and elderly people are particularly serious.Shaolin meditation,as a localized way of regulating body and mind,is considered to play a positive role in maintaining emotional function and improving physical and mental health.However,there is still a lack of empirical research on meditation,emotion processing and their internal brain mechanisms at home and abroad.Therefore,this study focuses on the impact of Shaolin meditation on the emotional processing of middle-aged and elderly people.Taking the monks with long-term meditation experience in Shaolin Temple(meditation group)and adult males without meditation experience in the surrounding areas(control group)as the research objects,the subjects in the meditation group included 16 monks with long-term meditation experience(average age = 49.18 years;average meditation duration = 15.75 years),and the subjects in the control group were 20 adults without meditation experience(average age = 44.5 years).The event-related potential technique was used to investigate the behavioral characteristics and brain time course characteristics of the subjects in the emotional face recognition and emotional Stroop tasks,To explore the impact of long-term meditation on individual emotional processing ability,and to provide empirical basis for taking meditation as a feasible intervention in the future.The conclusions are as follows:First,long-term meditators are more sensitive to emotions.In the emotional face recognition task,compared with the control group,the long-term meditation group had higher accuracy and shorter response time.In the emotional Stroop task,the response time of the long-term meditation group was also significantly lower than that of the control group;Second,long-term meditation experience has a positive effect on the automatic process of individual emotional face processing.The activation of N1 component in the early stage of emotional face recognition in the long-term meditation group was significantly higher than that in the control group;Third,both the long-term meditation group and the control group showed conflict effect and conflict resolution effect in the emotional Stroop task.Inconsistent conditions occupied more cognitive resources than consistent conditions.In the emotional Stroop task,the N450 and SP amplitudes induced by inconsistent conditions were significantly higher than those induced by consistent conditions;Fourth,the long-term meditation experience has a positive impact on the top-down process of individual emotional conflict control.The long-term meditation group can complete the conflict monitoring task without spending too much cognitive resources.The activation of N450 component of emotional conflict control in the long-term meditation group was significantly lower than that in the control group.Therefore,long-term meditation may be used as an intervention for the aging problem of middle-aged and elderly people,so as to slow down the regression of individual emotional processing ability with age.