Emotional evaluations of disliked politicians: Can they be changed through a short loving-kindness meditation?

The present data set shows the effects of a short loving kindness meditation (LKM) vs. an imagery task on the explicit and implicit evaluations (affective priming task) of a disliked politician, a neutral stranger, a neutral object and the participants themselves (using picture stimuli). Our study design was based on the set-up used by Hutcherson, Seppala and Gross (2008) who showed that a loving-kindness meditation can increase the positive evaluation of an unknown person. Since the loving-kindness meditation also aims to improve the attitude toward disliked persons, we intended to investigate if a short 6 minute meditation session, as it was used in the original publication, can improve the evaluation of a disliked person as well. Our results did not show an improvement for the meditation condition as in the study of Hutcherson et al. (2008). We only found an improvement of the explicit evaluations and a reduction in negative mood, both independent of intervention type. Therefore, we concluded that short meditation interventions might only lead to arousal effects, which would explain the generalized mood and evaluations effects.本数据集展示了短时慈爱冥想（Loving Kindness Meditation，LKM）与意象任务，对厌恶政客、中性陌生人、中性物品及被试自身（采用图片刺激）的外显与内隐评价（情感启动任务）的影响。本研究的实验设计参考了Hutcherson、Seppala与Gross（2008）的研究范式，该团队此前证实慈爱冥想可提升对陌生个体的积极评价。鉴于慈爱冥想亦旨在改善个体对厌恶对象的态度，我们旨在探究原版研究中采用的6分钟短时冥想干预，是否同样能提升对厌恶个体的评价。本研究结果未复刻Hutcherson等人（2008）的研究中冥想组的评价提升效应。仅观察到两类干预下的外显评价均有所提升，且负性情绪水平显著降低，且该效应与干预类型无关。据此我们认为，短时冥想干预可能仅产生唤醒效应，这可解释本次研究中普遍的情绪与评价改善效应。