Long-term Yoga Experience Predicted a Facilitated Attentional Disengagement from Fearful Faces.

Background: Facilitated attentional engagement to, and impaired disengagement from, negative stimuli are centrally involved in maladaptive psychological states, anxiety and mood disorders. Theoretical frameworks propose that yoga-based practices modulate attention to emotion via bottom-up and top-down processes which could shape attentional engagement and disengagement patterns over time, respectively, and thus promote healthier emotion processing.

Aims and objectives: This study examined whether long-term yoga practice and current weekly practice load predicted reduced emotional bias in predominantly bottom-up and top-down emotional attention, as indicated by attentional engagement and disengagement performance in two emotional spatial cueing tasks.

Materials and methods: Twenty long-term yoga practitioners (gender: 60% feminine; mean age: 46.60 ± 12.37 years; mean yoga experience: 16.40 ± 13.02 years; yoga/meditation teachers: 70%) completed two emotional spatial cueing tasks, under exogenous or endogenous orienting. Engagement and disengagement biases are derived from reaction times to fearful vs. neutral facial expressions.

Results: The results indicated that only long-term yoga experience, and not current weekly hours of practice, interacted with performance in the spatial cueing tasks. Specifically, long-term yoga experience was associated with facilitated attentional disengagement from fearful faces under endogenous orienting, which represent conditions largely dependent on top-down attentional control and regulatory skills.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that long-term regular yoga practice primarily modified top-down processes of emotion regulation in our sample. This study helps to address research gaps in the field by employing behavioral methods, uncovering mechanisms underlying long-term contemplative practices, and indicating how behavioral health interventions can shape cognitive-affective processes.