The Effect of Focused Breathing on Response Inhibition and Perception of Affective Words: A Behavioral and an EEG Study

When practiced over long periods of time (>16 weeks), mindfulness positively impacts inhibitory processing, in that as mindfulness exposure and experience increases, inhibitory processing is enhanced. Similarly, long-term mindfulness practice diminishes the impact of emotionally-valanced scenes. However recently, more work is underway on how brief mindfulness inductions impact these same outcomes. Across two online pilot studies (behavioral outcomes only) and one in-person experiment (behavioral and neuronal outcomes), how a brief focused-breathing induction impacts response inhibition and the perception of affective words was explored. Findings demonstrate that a 30-minute mindfulness induction produced a diminished Simon Effect, as well as faster processing of neutral and positive words (faster LPP latencies) and less-effortful processing of negative words (reduced LPP amplitudes). How brief mindfulness inductions may impact resting frontal alpha asymmetry were also explored.