Are You Distracted by Pleasure? Practice Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness improves attentional control and regulates emotion. In the current study, two experiments were conducted to examine the role of sustained mindfulness practice in attentional capture by emotional distractors in different perceptual load conditions. Individuals with previous experience in mindfulness meditation and those without meditation experience participated. Participants were required to identify and respond to a target letter in a visual search task in high and low perceptual load conditions. They were instructed to ignore the distractors (Experiment 1: happy or angry faces; Experiment 2: pleasurable or unpleasurable IAPS images), which were present in 25% of total trials. Results indicated that distractors with positive emotional information captured the attention and interfered with the task performance of non-meditators in the high-load condition. However, mindfulness meditators reduced the interference from positive emotional information in the high-load condition. Moreover, mindfulness meditators processed negative emotional distractors more than non-meditators without compromising the visual-search performance in the high-load condition. Given that processing negative emotion requires more attentional resources than processing positive emotion, it may show that mindfulness meditators have more attentional resources. Additionally, those who practiced mindfulness meditation reported greater psychological well-being and fewer depressive symptoms. The findings suggest that mindfulness might improve attentional control for positive and pleasurable distractors. It reflects a diminished need in meditators to seek satisfaction from external pleasurable distractions. The findings have practical implications for managing hedonic compulsive behaviors and theoretical implications for understanding the interactive role of emotion and attention in mindfulness.