Mindfulness Meditation Improves Musical Aesthetic Emotion Processing in Young Adults

Abstract

This study explored the behavioral and neural correlates of mindfulness meditation improvement in musical aesthetic emotion processing (MAEP) in young adults, using the revised across-modal priming paradigm. Sixty-two participants were selected from 652 college students who assessed their mindfulness traits using the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS). According to the 27% ratio of the high and low total scores, participants were divided into two subgroups: high trait group (n = 31) and low trait group (n = 31). Participants underwent facial recognition and emotional arousal tasks while listening to music, and simultaneously recorded event-related potentials (ERPs). The N400, P3, and late positive component (LPC) were investigated. The behavioral results showed that mindfulness meditation improved executive control abilities in emotional face processing and effectively regulated the emotional arousal of repeated listening to familiar music among young adults. These improvements were associated with positive changes in key neural signatures of facial recognition (smaller P3 and larger LPC effects) and emotional arousal (smaller N400 and larger LPC effects). Our results show that P3, N400, and LPC are important neural markers for the improvement of executive control and regulating emotional arousal in musical aesthetic emotion processing, providing new evidence for exploring attention training and emotional processing. We revised the affecting priming paradigm and E-prime 3.0 procedure to fulfill the simultaneous measurement of music listening and experimental tasks and provide a new experimental paradigm to simultaneously detect the behavioral and neural correlates of mindfulness-based musical aesthetic processing.