Efeitos comportamentais e psicofisiológicos da meditação mindfulness no emprego de duas estratégias de regulação emocional

• Autor(a) principal: Teixeira, Camila Paulino Rodrigues Alves
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações do Mackenzie
• Texto Completo: http://dspace.mackenzie.br/handle/10899/22738
• topic: regulação emocional; reavaliação cognitiva; distração; meditação mindfulness; atividade eletrocardiográfica; CNPQ::CIENCIAS HUMANAS::PSICOLOGIA::PSICOLOGIA FISIOLOGICA::NEUROLOGIA, ELETROFISIOLOGIA E COMPORTAMENTO

Among the various strategies for modulating the components of the emotion responses, the cognitive reappraisal and distraction are highlighted in current researches. As indicated in recent studies, the capacity for emotion regulation is typically improved from mindfulness meditation. This practice usually offers benefits to people's cognitive functioning, and aims to perfect a characteristic that is intrinsic to every human being: the ability to turn attention to the present moment. In this sense, this study sought to investigate the effect of mindfulness on cognitive reappraisal and distraction. Ninety healthy subjects without any previous experience in meditation were collected. Of these participants, 30 were submitted to a mindfulness practice with full attention on the observation of thoughts; 30 went through the Meditation on Twin Hearts (MTH); and the remaining 30 did not go through either practice (control group). After the practice, all the participants attended to a task of affective contend images observation, adopting emotion regulation strategies and evaluating each of the images as to their valence and intensity. In addition to the behavioral data, the participants' psychophysiological measures were recorded via electrocardiography (ECG). The results demonstrate a greater efficacy of MTH in suppressing or amplifying the emotions when analyzed the valence scales of the images. For the other measures (intensity scales and ECG), there was not effect of the group, only of the strategies. Thus, to reduce the intensity of a negative image, cognitive reappraisal and distraction were equally efficient. However, only reappraisal proved to be effective in increasing emotional arousal when faced with positive images. Regarding ECG data, there was no statistically significant reduction in cardiac acceleration resulting from emotion regulation strategies. Otherwise, distraction was the strategy that recruited greater cardiac acceleration during the experimental task, regardless of the category of the image. The results indicate that contemplative meditation (MTH) can positively influence the emotion regulation ability, even when performed by non-meditators and only once. However, in Mindfulness meditation, the focus of this study, this same immediate effect was not found, which indicates that the benefits of this meditation can be perceived from a continuous and long-term practice, as already seen in the literature.