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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.