This work represents one of the first attempts to examine the effects of meditation on the processing of written single words. In the present longitudinal study, participants conducted a lexical decision task and rated the affective valence of nouns before and after a 7-week class in mindfulness meditation, loving-kindness meditation, or a control intervention. Both meditation groups rated the emotional valence of nouns more neutral after the interventions, suggesting a general down-regulation of emotions. In the loving-kindness group, positive words were rated more positively after the intervention, suggesting a specific intensification of positive feelings. After both meditation interventions, response times in the lexical decision task accelerated significantly, with the largest facilitation occurring in the loving-kindness group. We assume that meditation might have led to increased attention, better visual discrimination, a broadened attentional focus, and reduced mind-wandering, which in turn enabled accelerated word recognition. These results extend findings from a previous study with expert Zen meditators, in which we found that one session of advanced meditation can affect word recognition in a very similar way.

这项工作代表了第一次尝试检查冥想对书面单词处理的影响。在目前的纵向研究中，参与者进行了一项词汇决策任务，并在为期 7 周的正念冥想、慈爱冥想或控制干预课程之前和之后评估了名词的情感效价。干预后，两个冥想组都认为名词的情绪效价更中性，这表明情绪普遍下调。在慈爱组中，积极的话语在干预后的评价更高，表明积极情绪的特定强化。在两次冥想干预之后，词汇决策任务的响应时间显着加快，最大的促进发生在慈爱组。我们假设冥想可能会增加注意力、更好的视觉辨别力、扩大注意力焦点和减少走神，从而加速单词识别。这些结果扩展了之前与专业禅修者的一项研究的结果，在该研究中，我们发现一次高级冥想可以以非常相似的方式影响单词识别。