Background
The literature suggests that loving-kindness meditation leads to greater personal and interpersonal wellbeing, but we do not know whether it affects aggressivity and if it persists through cognitive fatigue (i.e., ego-depletion).
Hypotheses/Research Questions
We ask: (a) Which of loving-kindness meditation, reflection, or waitlist group lowers aggressivity the most? and (b) Will cognitive fatigue moderate the link between attitudes and behavior differently based on group?
Sample Characteristics and Sample Size
We will recruit 150 participants, between 18 and 35 years old, with no history of psychiatric or neurological disorder, and that don’t have more than 10 hours of meditation practice.
Design
Using a randomized controlled trial, participants are assigned to one of three groups: loving-kindness meditation, loving-kindness reflection or to a waitlist control. The meditation group engages in daily guided meditations; the reflection group listens to podcasts and reads excerpts on loving-kindness; the waitlist receives no intervention. We also manipulate participants’ cognitive fatigue with a Stroop task and measure participants’ aggressive behavior, conscious aggressiveness, and unconscious aggressiveness (before and after the intervention).
Results
We expect that both the meditation and reflection groups will show greater decreases in aggressive behavior and conscious and unconscious aggressiveness compared to the waitlist group. The meditation group should also show greater decreases in unconscious aggressiveness compared to the reflection group. Furthermore, ego-depletion should increase the predictive power of implicit attitudes and reduce that of explicit attitudes, but only for the reflection and waitlist groups. The meditation group should lead to lower unconscious aggressiveness, therefore remaining equally aggressive whether depleted or not.
Scientific Contribution
This project will clarify the effects of loving-kindness meditation on aggressivity and its resilience to cognitive fatigue. It will also advance knowledge on dualistic theories of socio-cognitive processes, clarifying the interplay between meditation, ego-depletion, conscious and unconscious processes, and behaviour.