Neural Correlates of Dispositional Mindfulness During Affect Labeling

Abstract

Objective: Mindfulness is a process whereby one is aware and receptive to present moment experiences. Although mindfulnessenhancing interventions reduce pathological mental and physical health symptoms across a wide variety of conditions and diseases, the mechanisms underlying these effects remain unknown. Converging evidence from the mindfulness and neuroscience literature suggests that labeling affect may be one mechanism for these effects. Methods: Participants (n ϭ 27) indicated trait levels of mindfulness and then completed an affect labeling task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The labeling task consisted of matching facial expressions to appropriate affect words (affect labeling) or to gender-appropriate names (gender labeling control task). Results: After controlling for multiple individual difference measures, dispositional mindfulness was associated with greater widespread prefrontal cortical activation, and reduced bilateral amygdala activity during affect labeling, compared with the gender labeling control task. Further, strong negative associations were found between areas of prefrontal cortex and right amygdala responses in participants high in mindfulness but not in participants low in mindfulness. Conclusions: The present findings with a dispositional measure of mindfulness suggest one potential neurocognitive mechanism for understanding how mindfulness meditation interventions reduce negative affect and improve health outcomes, showing that mindfulness is associated with enhanced prefrontal cortical regulation of affect through labeling of negative affective stimuli.

Stop the sadness: Neuroticism is associated with sustained medial prefrontal cortex response to emotional facial expressions

“…The location of sustained activation is consistent with previous studies that reported a significant correlation between MedPFC activation and rumination (Ray et al, 2005) and MedPFC activation and mindfulness (Creswell et al, 2007). A whole-brain analysis utilizing the same threshold did not identify any other regions of the brain to display this pattern.…”

Self-related awareness and emotion regulation

“…Emotionintrospection activated more posteriorly bilateral inferior frontal/premotor regions and also minor parts of the middle insula. This was not fully in line with findings of activity in the relatively more anterior VLPFC during affect labeling in states of mindfulness (Brefczynski-Lewis et al, 2007;Creswell et al, 2007;Farb et al, 2007;Lieberman et al, 2007;Stein et al, 2008) but in part with interoception associated activity in the insula (Critchley et al, 2004).…”

“…Ventrolateral prefrontal and midline prefrontal areas and also the amygdala were identified to be important components of mindfulness mediating networks (Brefczynski-Lewis et al, 2007;Creswell et al, 2007;Farb et al, 2007;Stein et al, 2008).…”

Mindfulness and emotion regulation—an fMRI study

“…Further, subjects with higher trait mindfulness scores showed greater prefrontal and less amygdala activity during affect labeling (Creswell et al, 2007). Another study used the mindfulness-related construct 'level of emotional awareness' and found similar positive correlations between level of emotional awareness and activation in response to emotional stimuli in prefrontal, cingulate and insular cortex .…”

“…Resulting summary images were subjected to second-level group analyses within predefined cubic ROIs: in our main ROI, the amygdala (Figure 2), and additionally in the DMPFC, DLPFC and anterior insula. ROIs were defined according to activation coordinates in fMRI studies on emotion regulation (amygdala; Ochsner et al, 2002;Ochsner et al, 2004;Goldin et al, 2008;Herwig et al, 2010) and studies on mindfulness (anterior insula, DMPFC, DLPFC; Creswell et al, 2007;Herwig et al, 2010) and anatomically validated using the Talairach client (Lancaster et al, 2000). MNI coordinates were non-linearly transformed into TAL space with Matlab's mni2tal-function (Brett, 2009).…”