Comparing psychedelic and meditation experience reports with Natural Language Processing
Konsta Kallio-mannila, Rosa Salmela, Jussi Jylkkä
preprint DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/5dbzm_v1
Summary
Psychedelic experiences and meditation reports were found to be highly similar in content, with both eliciting positive emotions. However, those who reported on psychedelic experiences exhibited greater emotional intensity, showing higher levels of both positive and negative sentiments compared to the more neutral feelings associated with meditation. This suggests that while the two types of experiences are generally alike, the emotional intensity could differentiate them. Limitations in the methods used may affect the conclusions drawn.
Study at a glance
| Design | exploratory study |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 197 |
| Population | participants reporting on meaningful experiences facilitated by psychedelics or meditation |
| Key finding | Psychedelic experience reports were more emotionally charged than meditation reports, despite both showing high similarity in content. |
Abstract
Psychedelics and meditation are known for their potential to induce personally meaningful and even transformative experiences. However, it is unclear how similar these experiences are, or how they differ from each other. This explorative study used Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to compare reports of personally meaningful subjective experiences facilitated by either psychedelic substances or meditation. Participants (N = 197) wrote open-ended narrative reports about their most meaningful experience facilitated either with psychedelics (n = 134) or meditation (n = 63). These reports were analysed with text similarity analyses, topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The semantic and lexical contents of the reports were highly similar and both groups expressed positive emotions on average. However, psychedelic experience reports were more emotionally charged, showing higher levels of positive and negative sentiments compared to more neutral meditation experiences. These results suggest that the two types of subjective experiences might be quite similar in general, but emotional intensity could be a distinguishing factor between them. Challenges with the NLP methods and the dataset limit the conclusions that can be drawn from the study. However, it offers new hypotheses and suggestions for future research on transformative experiences.