Meditation affects word recognition of meditation novices

Abstract

This work represents one of the first attempts to examine the effects of meditation on the processing of written single words. In the present longitudinal study, participants conducted a lexical decision task and rated the affective valence of nouns before and after a 7-week class in mindfulness meditation, loving-kindness meditation, or a control intervention. Both meditation groups rated the emotional valence of nouns more neutral after the interventions, suggesting a general down-regulation of emotions. In the loving-kindness group, positive words were rated more positively after the intervention, suggesting a specific intensification of positive feelings. After both meditation interventions, response times in the lexical decision task accelerated significantly, with the largest facilitation occurring in the loving-kindness group. We assume that meditation might have led to increased attention, better visual discrimination, a broadened attentional focus, and reduced mind-wandering, which in turn enabled accelerated word recognition. These results extend findings from a previous study with expert Zen meditators, in which we found that one session of advanced meditation can affect word recognition in a very similar way.

Mindful Text Comprehension: Meditation Training Improves Reading Comprehension of Meditation Novices

“…However, in the present study, none of the changes in experiencing emotions was positively associated with improved reading comprehension. This may be related to the fact that, unlike in the word recognition studies of Lusnig et al, (2020Lusnig et al, ( , 2022, the text materials used in the present work had no affective connotation and did not call for a substantial affective evaluation.…”

“…Therefore, we assumed that emotion regulation could be another underlying mechanism of meditation that might lead to enhanced text processing. Lusnig et al, (2020Lusnig et al, ( , 2022 showed that meditation can affect single word processing and also neutralize valence ratings on emotional words. However, in the present study, none of the changes in experiencing emotions was positively associated with improved reading comprehension.…”

“…Response times to single words can be affected by many different word properties, for example, arousal, frequency, or word length (Hofmann et al, 2009;Kuchinke et al, 2007;New et al, 2006) and are also modified by inter-individual differences between readers (Mueller & Kuchinke, 2016;Siegle et al, 2002). As meditation practice was also found to elicit faster single word recognition (Lusnig et al, 2020(Lusnig et al, , 2022, the question arises of whether meditation training can also influence reading speed of whole texts. This research question is mostly unanswered.…”

“…In addition, reading comprehension was not measured in their study. It is therefore possible that their meditation group showed increased single word recognition (as in Lusnig et al, 2020Lusnig et al, , 2022), but at the expense of comprehension. In the present study, reading speed did not accelerate, presumably because the readers also focused on good text comprehension during a standardized reading test, measuring reading for meaning within a certain time limit.…”

“…A recent pilot study by Rice et al (2020) suggested that as little as 5 days of mindfulness meditation practice can increase reading speed. Lusnig et al (2020Lusnig et al ( , 2022 found that various meditation technics can accelerate single word processing, while the capacity for emotion regulation was demonstrated by attenuated valence ratings for emotional words.…”