Structural, Functional, and Behavioral Effects of Meditation

描述（由申请人提供）：情绪调节是心理健康的重要组成部分。行为疗法早就认识到提高情绪调节技能对促进恢复力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，因为它利用了对经验的无偏见的当下意识。几项实证研究表明，冥想练习与情绪调节、心理健康和幸福感的改善有关。然而，人们对这些改善背后的神经生物学机制知之甚少。这项随机、受控、纵向研究的目的是确定冥想练习对情绪调节的改善背后的神经机制。90名健康但压力很大的参与者将被随机分配到一个为期八周的正念减压（MBSR）项目或一个主动控制干预项目，该干预项目是专门为控制与MBSR相关的非特异性干预效果而设计的。在前-后设计中，参与者将在获取功能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，MBSR参与者在适应性情绪调节的神经功能方面比对照组参与者表现出更大的改善。此外，我们将测量灰质形态的变化，以确定MBSR后情绪调节改善的其他神经相关性。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的作用。

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.