CONCENTRATIVE MEDITATION ON MEMORY OF EMOTIONALLY-VALENCED STIMULI

Concentrative meditation derives from mindfulness practices; it is a meditation for beginners which helps meditators focus on specific stimuli such as sounds or breathing patterns. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of concentrative meditation on memory for positively, negatively, and neutrally valenced visual stimuli. In the current study, undergraduate student participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: concentrative meditation or mind-wandering meditation (active control). Participants were presented with positive, neutral, and negative still images and completed a free recall task. We hypothesized that participants in the concentrative meditation condition would perform best at free recall memory tasks and that participants in both conditions would remember emotionally-valenced stimuli best. Findings suggest that participants remembered more emotionally-valenced stimuli than neutral stimuli. Contrary to expectations, the mind-wandering active control condition performed better at free recall memory tasks than the concentrative meditation condition.