Effects of Current and Long-Term Yoga Practice on Explicit and Implicit Emotion Regulation

Abstract

Yoga-based practices are proposed to affect explicit and implicit emotion regulation. This work presents two studies that investigated this proposition. Study 1 tested whether long term and current weekly hours of yoga practice predicted self-reported cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, attentional focusing, and attentional shifting (as indices of explicit emotion regulation), and performance in a verbal emotional go/no-go task (as implicit emotion regulation), in a pre-registered, online, and cross-sectional design. Out of 368 respondents (gender: 79.3% female, 20.1% male, 0.6% non-binary; mean age: 33.85±7.28 years; mean yoga experience: 6.9±5.73 years), 225 completed explicit measures, and 143 completed all of them. Among explicit measures, long-term and current yoga practice predicted greater attentional focusing only. Comparing response patterns of happy vs. sad stimuli in the go/no-go task, long term yoga experience predicted less commission errors in sad blocks, whilst current yoga practice predicted less valence differences in mean reaction times. Study 2 followed up on these findings, testing the feasibility of combining heart rate variability and emotional spatial cueing paradigms to disentangle top-down and bottom-up effects of yoga on emotion regulation. As a pilot study, it tested whether long-term and current yoga practice predicted greater heart rate variability across measurement conditions (baseline, mild stress, and recovery), and whether they predicted less emotional bias in spatial cueing tasks under exogenous and endogenous orienting, using fearful and neutral facial stimuli of high, low, and broad spatial frequencies. Out of 27 participants, 20 were included due to clinical conditions or technical difficulties in data collection (gender: 60% feminine, 35% masculine, 5% non-binary; age: 46.60±12.37 years, on average; yoga experience: 16.40±13.02 years, on average; yoga/meditation teachers: 70%). HRVs differed as expected, suggesting an effective manipulation of measurement conditions. When controlling for yoga experience, all effects disappeared, what might suggest a mediational relationship (to be formally tested in future studies). Only long-term yoga experience, and not current hours of practice, interacted with performance in the spatial cueing tasks. Long-term yoga experience was associated with a facilitated attentional disengagement away from fearful faces, specifically under endogenous orienting, which are processes largely based on attentional control and regulatory skills. These results suggest that long-term regular yoga practice primarily modified top-down processes of emotion regulation, although bottom-up effects cannot be discarded, considering methodological limitations of this work. Combined, both studies suggest that the modification of top-down attentional functions constitutes a possible pathway through which yoga affects explicit and implicit emotion regulation, leading to less overall emotional bias. Although encouraging, these findings should be met with caution, and they await further empirical support from different fronts of evidence.