Meditation practitioners reported using humor, positive affect, combined emotion regulation strategies, and adaptive attention allocation during a stressful laboratory task, compared to non-meditators. Interviews with 25 meditators and 20 controls after the Trier Social Stress Test revealed five themes: primary experiences, reasons for stress, affect, emotion regulation, and attention allocation. The findings suggest that contemplative training may alter the subjective experience of psychological stress, offering new insights into how meditation attenuates stress responses.
Two brief meditations—focused and deconstructive—administered before a social stress task increased heart rate variability prior to the stressor, indicating reduced physiological activation, compared to an active control condition. However, this effect did not persist during the stress task itself. Anticipatory cognitive threat appraisal decreased across all conditions, showing no specific meditation benefit. The findings suggest that even a single, short meditation session can lower physiological arousal before a stressful event, and that deconstructive meditations may offer stress-reducing potential similar to better-studied attentional meditations.