Accentuate the (Low Arousal?) Positive: Effects of Mindfulness on Positive Emotional Responding

Historically, mindfulness literature has focused far more on negative than positive emotions, and results regarding mindfulness’ influence on positive emotions are somewhat mixed. It is still unclear under what conditions mindfulness facilitates, reduces, or does not affect positive affective responding. A key likelihood of mindfulness practice is a fostering of the low-arousal positive affective (LoPA) state of peacefulness, while mindfulness practitioners warn against over-engagement with high-arousal positive affect (HiPA). Thus, mindfulness may be more likely to elicit LoPA than HiPA. However, few mindfulness studies even include measures of both LoPA and HiPA, and no study assesses how a mindfulness induction influences LoPA relative to HiPA in response to low- and high-arousal positive stimuli, which could clarify murky findings with increased experimental control. Additionally, the mindfulness literature focuses heavily on experience of emotion; however, mindfulness may more reliably exert influence on earlier aspects of affective processes such as how evocative stimuli are perceived, rather than on the typical measure of emotional experience. Therefore, this study builds upon prior research by discerning whether a brief mindfulness induction facilitates how calming more so than how exciting people find low- and high-arousal pleasant pictures, relative to a control induction. After a brief mindfulness or control induction, participants (n = 253) indicated how calming and exciting they perceived low- and high-arousal pleasant images. Data did not support the primary hypotheses; the mindfulness induction did not affect how calming and exciting people found the pictures. Additional analyses of individual differences yielded some, but not many, potentially interesting results. Future research can address methodological limitations such as the difficulty of practicing a brief mindfulness induction for novices, a non-ideal emotion induction, and a lack of participant engagement—all of which likely contributed to the null findings.