The Effect of a Brief Mindfulness Intervention on Memory for Positively and Negatively Valenced Stimuli

The Effect of a Brief Mindfulness Intervention on Memory for Positively and Negatively Valenced Stimuli

Hugo J. E. M. Alberts¹ and Roy Thewissen²

(1)	Department of Clinical and Psychological Science, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, Maastricht, The Netherlands

(2)	SeeTrue Mindfulness Training, Maastricht, The Netherlands

 

Hugo J. E. M. Alberts
Email: h.alberts@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Published online: 8 February 2011

Abstract  

A core component of mindfulness is non-judgmental observation of internal and external stimuli. The present study investigated the effect of mindfulness on memory for emotional stimuli. Participants were exposed to a brief mindfulness intervention and subsequently performed a verbal learning test consisting of positive, neutral, and negative words. Control participants received no intervention and directly performed the verbal learning test. After 20 min, participants recalled as many words as possible. Participants in the mindfulness condition remembered a significantly lower proportion of negative words compared to control participants. No differences between both groups were observed for the proportion of remembered positive words. These findings suggest that memory processes may be a potential mechanism underlying the link between mindfulness and subjective well-being.

Keywords  Mindfulness – Memory – Recall – Bias – Well-being

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Introduction

Mindfulness has been conceptualized as “the non-judgmental observation of the ongoing stream of internal and external stimuli as they arise” Baer (2003, p. 125). Mounting evidence suggests a clear unidirectional link between mindfulness and positive subjective experience. For instance, a study by Frewen et al. (2007) showed that higher levels of dispositional mindfulness were related to fewer negative automatic thoughts. In addition, mood and affective processes have been found to improve after participation in mindfulness-based stress reduction programs (Nyklícek and Kuijpers 2008; see also Brown and Ryan 2003). Today, the vast majority studies on mindfulness are field studies with clinical populations including individuals with eating, mood, anxiety, or personality disorders (Bach and Hayes 2002; Campbell-Sills et al. 2006; Levit et al. 2004). Although these studies demonstrate the benefits of mindfulness-based practice, relatively little is known about the mechanisms that underlie the effects of mindfulness on well-being. A potential mechanism underlying this effect may be the alteration of memory for emotional information. Rather than focusing on ways to alter or avoid stimuli, the emphasis in mindfulness is on allowance and acceptance, thereby changing one’s relationship to stimuli. Mindfulness draws on the ability to remain aware, irrespective of the apparent valence of states or stimuli, which may alter their impact on memory. The present study was designed to address the effect of mindful awareness on memory for positively and negatively valenced stimuli, using a laboratory setting.

In general, people tend to recognize a greater proportion of emotional information than emotionally neutral information (for a review, see Buchanan and Adolphs 2002; Hamann 2001). At a neural level, this finding has been associated with activity of the amygdala and related limbic areas. Previous studies reveal that activity in the amygdala is significantly greater for positive and negative stimuli (relative to neutral stimuli), which implies that emotional, but not neutral, stimuli are processed by the amygdala (Garavan et al. 2001; Hamann and Mao 2002). In line with this, depressed individuals have been found to have superior recall of negative, compared with positive, information (Matt et al. 1992), a finding that has been related to dysfunctional amygdala activity (Drevets et al. 2002). For instance, a neuroimaging study by Siegle et al. (2007) found that depressive patients, compared with health control participants, showed hyperactivity of the amygdala when exposed to emotional stimuli.

So far, to our knowledge, no studies have directly addressed the link between mindfulness and memory processes. Recently, however, a study by Way et al. (2010) on the neural relationship between mindfulness and depression provided indirect evidence for a possible impact of mindfulness on memory. This study revealed that amygdala reactivity was positively related to depressive symptomatology and negatively correlated with dispositional mindfulness. When exposed to emotional stimuli, participants high in trait mindfulness showed relatively low amygdala reactivity. Given the fact that people tend to recognize emotional information better than emotionally neutral information, which has been linked to greater activity of the amygdala, the findings of Way et al. (2010) may imply that the reduced amygdala reactivity in mindfulness during exposure to emotional stimuli may attenuate the enhanced memory effect for emotional stimuli.

Moreover, from a more cognitive perspective, it seems plausible that mindful awareness can influence memory for emotional events. According to interactive cognitive subsystems (ICS) model (Teasdale and Barnard 1993), it is the explicit encoding of the emotional aspects of to-be-remembered stimuli that is responsible for emotional memory biases. Congruent with this assumption, a study by Ridout et al. (2009) revealed that, when the explicit processing of the emotional content of stimuli was reduced, no memory biases were observed. In this study, depressed individuals were exposed to a series of photographs consisting of emotional faces and were instructed to identify the gender (non-emotional encoding) of the individuals featured in the photographs. The results showed that, when this instruction was given, the consistently demonstrated enhanced memory effect for sad faces among this group was not observed. Likewise, mindful awareness may also reduce explicit processing of the emotional content of stimuli. Mindfulness is characterized by awareness without evaluation or judgment. In case of emotionally valenced stimuli, the absence of a negative or positive judgment may reduce the subjectively experienced negativity or positivity of a stimulus. Consequently, the previously discussed enhanced memory effect for emotional stimuli (Buchanan and Adolphs 2002; Hamann 2001) may be less pronounced when people are in a mindful mode of experiencing.

In order to test this prediction, participants were exposed to a brief mindfulness intervention and subsequently performed a verbal learning test consisting of positive, neutral, and negative words. Control participants did not receive this intervention and directly performed the verbal learning test. After 20 min, all participants were requested to recall as many words as possible.

Source: Springer [Open Access Paper]
http://www.springerlink.com/content/d747650225032854/fulltext.html

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