Meditasyonun, bir duygu düzenleme stratejisi olan kopma (detachment) üzerindeki etkisi

Meditation is a highly practiced technique to create emotional balance, cognitive enhancement, and general well-being. The aim of this study is to investigate the benefits of meditation on attentional stability and emotion regulation. We created a psychophysics task consist of number counting Stroop task and played emotionally triggering sounds on the headphones during the experiment. We intended to create cognitive load by asking the participants to respond to the tasks by congruent or incongruent according to the condition of the visuals in 1 second, while the affective sounds would distract their attention. The study consisted of 8 conditions as the combination of 2 visual conditions (congruent and incongruent) and 4 auditory conditions (arousal high- arousal low- pleasure high- pleasure low). We expected the group consisted of meditation practitioners to respond with higher accuracy rate (percentage) in lower reaction time (ms) compared to the meditation naïve control group. During the experiment, we recorded the electrophysiological activations of the participants and expected lower beta and gamma oscillations in the meditation group's frontal and temporal regions. The behavioral results fulfilled our expectations since the meditation group performed with higher accuracy rate and lower reaction time. Although the analysis of behavioral results showed that congruency had significant effect, there were no effect of affective sounds on participants' accuracy rate and reaction time. On the other hand, electrophysiological results revealed that both the congruency and sound type affected the participants', and in group comparison, the meditation group generated lower gamma oscillations both in frontal region which is associated with cognitive control and temporal region where the emotion processing occur. Our results indicated that meditation provides higher attentional stability and increase emotion regulation skills especially in neural level.