Structural, Functional, and Behavioral Effects of Meditation

描述(申请人提供)：情绪调节是心理健康的重要组成部分。行为疗法长期以来一直承认提高情绪调节技能、提高韧性和治疗心理障碍的重要性。冥想是一种心理训练实践，已经成功地应用于培养自我调节情绪的技能，因为它使用了对体验的无偏见的当下意识。一些实证研究表明，冥想的练习与情绪调节、心理健康和幸福感的改善有关。然而，人们对这些改进背后的神经生物学机制知之甚少。这项随机、对照、纵向研究的目标是确定冥想练习改善情绪调节的神经机制。90名健康但高度紧张的参与者将被随机分配到为期八周的基于正念的压力减轻(MBSR)计划中，或被分配到专门设计的积极控制干预中，以控制与MBSR相关的非特定干预效果。在后处理前的设计中，参与者将在获得功能性磁共振图像的同时执行情绪调节任务。我们假设，在课程结束后，与对照干预的参与者相比，MBSR参与者将在指示适应性情绪调节的神经功能方面表现出更大的改善。此外，我们将测量灰质形态计量学的变化，以确定MBSR后情绪调节改善的额外神经关联。我们的发现将有助于阐明冥想干预如何在神经生物学水平上发挥其有益健康的效果。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Emotion regulation is an essential component of mental health. Behavioral therapies have long acknowledged the importance of improving emotion regulation skills to promote resilience and to treat psychological disorders. Meditation is one mental training practice that has successfully been applied to cultivate skills in self-regulation of emotion, as it employs the un-biased present moment awareness of experiences. Several empirical studies have demonstrated that practice of meditation is associated with improvements in emotion regulation, mental health and well-being. However, little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie these improvements. The goal of this randomized, controlled, longitudinal study is to identify the neural mechanisms that underlie the improvements in emotion regulation associated with meditation practice. Ninety healthy but highly stressed participants will be randomly assigned to either an eight week Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program or to an active control intervention that has been specifically designed to control for non-specific intervention effects associated with MBSR. In a pre-post design, participants will perform an emotion regulation task while functional MR images are acquired. We hypothesize that after the course, MBSR participants will show greater improvements in neural functions indicative of adaptive emotion regulation compared to participants of the control intervention. Furthermore, we will measure changes in gray matter morphometry in order to determine additional neural correlates of improved emotion regulation following MBSR. Our findings will help elucidate how meditation interventions exert their salubrious effects at the neurobiological level.