People often rely on others to help manage their emotions, a process called interpersonal emotion regulation (IER), while mindfulness involves turning inward to regulate emotions. A longitudinal study of 469 undergraduates across three waves, each about 20 days apart, examined how these strategies relate to each other and to aggression. Contrary to predictions, individuals who were generally more mindful engaged in less IER over time. However, when participants were more mindful than their own average, they subsequently used more IER. Neither mindfulness nor IER consistently predicted aggressive behavior. The inverse relationship between these effective regulatory approaches raises questions about trade-offs between their costs and benefits.
A brief mindfulness induction altered functional brain networks in intimate partner dyads, reducing coherence within the Default Mode Network and increasing connectivity within the Frontoparietal Control and Salience Networks, while decoupling primary visual and attention-linked networks. However, these neural changes did not translate into reduced intimate partner aggression, and aggression was broadly unassociated with any network indices. The findings suggest that minimal doses of focused attention meditation can produce transient changes in large-scale brain networks, but their implications for aggressive behavior remain uncertain.