habitual, frequent motor response of pushing the button. Just as with the CPT, there was, on
average, a performance decline over time for participants at the start of the retreat. However, when
individuals participated in the meditation retreats, they began showing less of a decline midway
through the retreat, and slightly more so by the end of the three months (
.
Figure 3.
Accuracy performance during the 32-min response inhibition task. Response inhibition accuracy (A’) plotted
as a function of time on task (eight 4-min. blocks) for each of three testing points (pre-, mid-, and post-retreat) during
training. Data shown for participants in both retreats (N=58) during their respective training periods. Overall response
inhibition accuracy increased significantly from pre-retreat to mid-retreat. Reprinted from 8.
Importantly, through complex statistical modeling procedures, we found that improvements in
response inhibition pre- to mid-retreat actually predicted individuals’ improvements in
psychological adaptive functioning pre- to post-retreat
The beauty of this finding was its ability
to connect a low-level, boring, cognitive response-inhibition experiment to participants’ lived
experience, as revealed from the battery of self-report questionnaires. In Buddhist teachings,
individuals are encouraged to cultivate the ability to withhold knee-jerk responses in emotionally
charged situations or relationships, and instead act from a more grounded and wise place.
What about emotion? We took a developmental approach to our study of emotions. Three months
sounds like a long time to meditate full-time. However, in actuality, in terms of reshaping how you
regard the world emotionally, it’s not really that long. We were interested in examining facial
expressions for differences in the way individuals respond to emotional provocation. We evoked
emotion with short, intense film clips and we unobtrusively recorded participants’ facial expressions
while they watched these clips. Immediately after watching the film, we asked them to report about
the emotions that occurred during the film using a cued recall procedure that relied on a visual
storyboard of the clips.
One of the film clips that we showed to participants at the end of the retreat period was edited from
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