Des moines en laboratoire
Peut-on mesurer scientifiquement l’effet de la méditation sur l’activité cérébrale et
émotionnelle ? En testant des moines bouddhistes en laboratoire, les neurobiologistes
s’aventurent aux frontières de la science et de la spiritualité.
Depuis plusieurs années, des neurobiologistes américains mènent des expériences en
laboratoire sur des méditants bouddhistes. Intrigués par leur capacité de concentration et de
régulation émotionnelle, les chercheurs les soumettent à des tests et mesurent leur activité
cérébrale. Leur but : étudier la plasticité du cerveau, mieux comprendre l’esprit et sa relation
au corps pour, à terme, lutter contre le stress et les déséquilibres. La méditation accroît-elle les
facultés de concentration ? Si oui, dans quelle mesure ? Comment les moines parviennent-ils à
maîtriser leurs émotions ? Peut-on réellement mesurer le vécu ? À l’aide d’électrodes et de
scanners, les scientifiques explorent un territoire encore largement en friche. Ils analysent les
états de concentration, le phénomène de présence éveillée, la génération volontaire de
compassion – une pratique primordiale du bouddhisme réservée aux moines confirmés… Ces
recherches n’en sont qu’à leurs prémices, mais elles ont déjà révélé, chez les moines générant
la compassion, l’activation de connexions cérébrales spécifiques dans le cortex…
Méditation scientifique
De tests menés en laboratoire en entretiens avec les chercheurs, ce documentaire nous initie à
un tout nouveau domaine d’investigations : la neuroscience appliquée à la méditation. Initiées
au début des années 90 par le biologiste Francisco Varela, ces recherches ont bénéficié du
consentement du dalaï-lama au nom du “partage” des connaissances. Tout comme leurs sujets
d’étude, les chercheurs ont un seul but : connaître et améliorer l’esprit. Seule la démarche
diverge : les uns observent, les autres méditent. De cette rencontre inédite entre la science et
la spiritualité naîtront peut-être de nouvelles perspectives. Même si aujourd’hui les questions
restent nombreuses !
Documentaire de Delphine Morel (France, 2006, 52mn) Coproduction : ARTE France, ADR
Productions, The Buddhist Broadcasting Fundation ARTE FRANCE.
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Welcome to the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory (a.k.a. PEPLab)
Website!
We study people’s emotions, particularly their positive emotions. We are interested in how
positive emotions affect people’s thinking patterns, social behavior, and physiological
reactions. Our ultimate goal is to understand how positive emotions might accumulate and
compound to transform people’s lives for the better.
Our techniques include analyzing reactivity in people’s autonomic nervous systems (using a
wide range of measures) and facial muscles (using facial EMG) . We also assess the breadth
of attention and cognition using various computerized reaction time tests. We are also expert
in asking people to report on their subjective experiences of emotions and emotion-related
experiences using both on-line and retrospective techniques.
This site is intended to appeal to scientists, students, as well as the interested public. If you
would like information beyond what this website provides, please contact Professor Barbara
Fredrickson via email at blf@email.unc.edu or the lead research assistant Adrian Cox at
alcox@email.unc.edu.
Central to many existing theories of emotion is the concept of specific-action tendencies – the
idea that emotions prepare the body both physically and psychologically to act in particular
ways. For example, anger creates the urge to attack, fear causes an urge to escape and disgust
leads to the urge to expel. From this framework, positive emotions posed a puzzle.
Emotions like joy, serenity and gratitude don’t seem as useful as fear, anger or disgust. The
bodily changes, urges to act and the facial expressions produced by positive emotions are not
as specific or as obviously relevant to survival as those sparked by negative emotions. If
positive emotions didn’t promote our ancestors’ survival in life-threatening situations, then
what good were they? How did they survive evolutionary pressures? Did they have any
adaptive value at all?
Barbara Fredrickson developed the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions to
explain the mechanics of how positive emotions were important to survival. According to the
theory, positive emotions expand cognition and behavioral tendencies. Taking issue with the
view that all emotions lead to specific action tendencies, the theory argues that positive
emotions increase the number of potential behavioral options. Instead, emotions should be
cast as leading to changes in “momentary thought-action repertoires” – a range of potential
actions the body and mind are prepared to take.
The expanded cognitive flexibility evident during positive emotional states results in resource
building that becomes useful over time. Even though a positive emotional state is only
momentary, the benefits last in the form of traits, social bonds, and abilities that endure into
the future. The implication of this work is that positive emotions have inherent value to
human growth and development and cultivation of these emotions will help people lead fuller
lives.
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The Broaden Hypothesis
One central hypothesis, drawn from Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory, is the broaden
hypothesis. It states that discrete positive emotions broaden the scopes of attention and
cognition and lead to a widened array of thoughts and action impulses in the mind. A
corollary to this hypothesis is that negative emotions shrink these same arrays. Several recent
studies from our lab provide converging support for this hypothesis.
1. Global Bias in Global-Local Visual Processing: We induced positive, negative, and neutral
emotions using short video clips. Following the emotion induction, we assessed breadth of
attention to “the big picture” or “details.” Participants who saw the positive emotion videos
showed a bias towards seeing stimuli globally.
2. Enlarging Thought-Action Repertoires: Similar to the study described above, participants
watched emotion-eliciting videos. Afterwards, participants indicated all of the action urges
they had at that moment. It turned out that people induced to feel a positive emotion listed a
greater number of action-urges than people induced to feel negative or neutral emotions.
3. Inclusive social thinking: A highly robust finding is that people exhibit a tendency to
recognize people of their same race better than those of a different race. The effect is referred
to as the “Own-Race Bias” in face perception. In one of our experiments, Caucasian
participants viewed Black and White faces and were later asked to recall if they had seen the
faces previously. Additionally, by random assignment, they viewed a video to elicit joy, fear,
or neutrality prior to the facial recognition task. Results showed that when we induce positive
emotions in people, the own-race bias is is eliminated.
The Build Hypothesis
If we accept the premise that positive emotions broaden people’s mindsets what would be the
purpose? The build hypothesis explains the functionality of positive emotions. Unlike
negative emotions during which the body becomes prepared physically and mentally for
immediate action, the adaptive value of positive emotions lies not in the moment, but over the
long-term. From an evolutionary standpoint, the resources accrued through repeated
experiences of positive emotions enhance the odds of survival and of living long enough to
reproduce.
The resources gained through positive emotional experiences may be physical, social,
psychological or intellectual. Currently our lab aims to explore the many possible resources
that may be augmented as a result of positive emotion experience. Here are some of the
candidate resources:
Physical Resources – sleep quality, immunity from illnesses and diseases
Social – expanded social connections, social support
Intellectual – creativity, mindfulness,
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Psychological – trait resilience, optimism
This line of research is expanding. We recently found experimental support for the build
hypothesis using a manipulation that increased the level of positive emotions people
experienced. In a 2-month study, participants either attended a workshop cultivating positive
emotions through meditation or had no intervention whatsoever. The results indicated that
increasing the level of positive emotions leads to numerous benefits to health and well-being.
This work is currently in prepartion for publication.
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The National Institutes of Health, National Center for Complementary and Alternative
Medicine (NCCAM)
The Wisconsin center for the neuroscience and psychophysiology of meditation is a Center
for Excellence for Research in Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CERC).
This will be a highly focused center dedicated to novel and cutting-edge research on the
mechanisms through which meditation works. The initial five-year period of this Center is
focused on the brain mechanisms and peripheral biological correlates of two different forms
of meditation — mindfulness-based meditation and a form of meditation designed to cultivate
compassion and loving kindness. There are three projects included within this Center, two by
highly established investigators (Davidson and Tononi) and one by an extraordinarily
promising junior investigator (Lutz). Project 1 (Davidson) is focused on the impact of
compassion/loving kindness meditation on emotional reactivity and emotion regulation. This
will be addressed using both functional MRI (fMRI) and measures of peripheral physiology
and endocrine function. Project 2 (Lutz) is focused on the neural and behavioral correlates of
mindfulness meditation on attention and pain regulation. In addition, Project 2 will examine
the relation between changes in oscillatory rhythms during meditation and attention and pain
processing. Project 3 (Tononi) will examine the impact of meditation on spontaneous brain
activity during sleep. This project will also examine the impact of intensive meditation on
regional changes in slow wave activity during subsequent sleep. Finally, this project will use
transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to probe plastic changes in thalamocortical circuits
by examining the impact of TMS pulses on evoked gamma activity. Each of these projects
will be conducted on the same participants so that interrelations among the various measures
collected in the different projects can be examined. We believe that the understanding of the
mechanisms by which meditation produces changes in behavioral and biological processes
will be dramatically advanced through the work of this CERC.
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The Fetzer Initiative on the Neuroscience of Compassion, Love and Forgiveness
The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds will embark on an ambitious program that will
include:
1. Research to examine love, forgiveness and compassion through brain imaging and other
innovative measures. This includes: (a) the development of better laboratory behavioral
methods to examine love, forgiveness and compassion in conjunction with biological
indices; (b) examining variation in large samples to better understand exceptional
individuals and (c) continued research of different contemplative practices that may
deepen our capacity for compassion.
2. Two Fetzer Fellows will be appointed each year to receive a graduate stipend to
specifically focus their research attention on questions of love, compassion and
forgiveness from a neuroscientific perspective.
3. An annual two-day meeting each year to attract the highest visibility to the neuroscience
of love, forgiveness and compassion.
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Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training for the teachers at the Waisman
Center Early Childhood Education Program
Frances Haeberli
The objective of this research project is to gain insight into Mindfulness Based Stress
Reduction (MBSR) as an intervention to reduce the daily stress levels and increase the sense
of well-being of pre-school teachers. MBSR was developed by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn of the
University of Massachusetts Medical Center as an intervention for achieving stress reduction.
In this pilot research project we are investigating the extent to which MBSR can be used as a
program to improve the mental and physical health of teachers. The subject population will be
drawn from the group of teachers who work at the Waisman Center Early Childhood
Education Program. This is a specialized early childhood education program providing
programming to children with and without disabilities in a fully integrated context. The
research project will observe and monitor the impact of the MBSR intervention on social
stress and basic affective and attention functions, and the well-being of the teachers.
Effects of short-term compassion meditation training on the brain and helping behavior
Helen Weng, Andrew Fox, Diane Stodola
We are training people with no meditation experience in compassion meditation, a meditation
where one focuses on wishing freedom from suffering for different kinds of people. We are
comparing compassion meditation training to a matched cognitive reappraisal training, where
people learn to think about stressful situations in their life in a different, more effective way.
We are examining brain activity in response to pictures of human suffering before and after
compassion and reappraisal training to see how both strategies may be regulating emotional
responses in different ways. Importantly, we expect compassion meditation to not only help
people regulate their emotions but also promote helping behavior. We are measuring helping
behavior using economic game and donation tasks.
Neuroeconomic measures of helping behaviour
Helen Weng, Andrew Fox, Donal MacCoon, Elizabeth Vanderwerff, Diane Stodola
Economic games are a simple, controlled way of studying social behavior using economic
exchanges. We are applying this methodology to study helping behavior. We have designed
novel economic games to model redistribution of wealth from a wealthier dictator to a poorer
recipient, as well as direct helping to a poorer recipient. Redistribution of wealth has been
found to be motivated by trait empathic concern. We are currently studying what traits
motivate punishment and helping behavior. We are also investigating whether different kinds
of meditation (particularly compassion meditation) may influence economic game behavior.
The games are also being used as a potential way to measure sustainable well-being.
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Mindfulness meditation effects on automatic emotion regulation in the brain
Helen Weng, Antoine Lutz, Frances Haeberli, Diane Stodola
We are investigating how mindfulness meditation may effect of neural processing of
emotional pictures when people have a certain belief about the pictures. Mindfulness
meditation teaches people to be present to whatever thoughts and emotions arise, and we are
hoping to understand this process by investigating how brain areas are connected to each
other before and after mindfulness training.
Exploring the positive qualities of attention
Daniel Levinson
The ability to give undivided attention to a person or task is a valuable but challenging
capacity to develop. The present study is aimed towards designing a behavioral game
sensitive to divided attention, such as mind wandering, that is compatible with the
methodological constraints of neuroimaging. This would facilitate investigation of brain
processes supporting undivided attention, and may provide a springboard for exploration of
how such attention is trained.
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