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
AI-generated from the abstractReports of personally meaningful experiences from psychedelic substances and meditation are highly similar in semantic and lexical content, with both groups expressing positive emotions on average. However, psychedelic experience reports are more emotionally charged, showing higher levels of both positive and negative sentiments compared to the more neutral meditation experiences. This suggests emotional intensity may be a distinguishing factor between the two types of experiences. The study used Natural Language Processing methods to analyze open-ended narratives from 197 participants, but challenges with the methods and dataset limit the conclusions that can be drawn.
Study at a glance
| Characteristics | Explorative study |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 197 |
| Population | Adults who wrote about their most meaningful experience facilitated by psychedelics or meditation |
| Citations | 2 |
| Key finding | Psychedelic and meditation experience reports are semantically similar, but psychedelic reports show higher emotional intensity, with more positive and negative sentiments than the more neutral meditation reports. |
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.