ArticlePloS one2020
Zen meditation neutralizes emotional evaluation, but not implicit affective processing of words.
Article in PloS one, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mindfulness, cognition, and long-term meditators: Toward a science of advanced meditation.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Social context effects on emotional language: The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the emotional evaluation of words.Acta psychologica · 2022Article
- Meditation affects word recognition of meditation novices.Psychological research · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
There is ample evidence that meditation can regulate emotions. It is questionable, however, whether meditation can down-regulate sensitivity to emotional experience in high-level cognitive representations such as words. The present study shows that adept Zen meditators rated the emotional valence of (low-arousal) positive and (high- and low-arousal) negative nouns significantly more neutral after a meditation session, while there was no change of valence ratings after a comparison intervention in the comparison group. Because the Zen group provided greater "openness to experience" and lower "need for achievement and performance" in the "Big Five" personality assessment, we used these scores as covariates for all analyses. We found no differential emotion effects of Zen meditation during lexical decision, but we replicated the slow-down of low-arousal negative words during lexical decision in both groups. Interestingly, Zen meditation elicited a global facilitation of all response times, which we discuss in terms of increased attentional resources after meditation.
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