Impact of short- and long-term mindfulness meditation training on amygdala reactivity to emotional stimuli

Description: Participants viewed stimuli from the International Affective Pictures System (IAPS), which were presented for 4 seconds each followed by a jittered inter-stimulus-interval. Positive, negative and neutral IAPS were presented in pseudo-random order, balanced for sociality and excluding erotic images from the IAPS. A neutral face followed the IAPS presentation on 2/3 of the trials - evenly split by a 1 s or 3 s interval. Participants pressed a button during the IAPS presentation to indicate the valence of the picture (negative, positive or neutral). Un-thresholded statistical maps are included for each group for each contrast of interest for the analysis of the impact of mindfulness meditation training. Long-term meditators (LTM) were compared to meditation-naive participants (MNP). Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) was compared to a well-matched, active control intervention - the Health Enhancement Program (HEP) - in a randomized control trial arm of the study. Contrasts for MBSR and HEP consist of the post-intervention activation controlling for baseline.

Related article: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.07.013