Relaxation via Cross-Modal Adaptation : Autonomic Nervous System Responses and Subjective Relaxation Efficacy of Mindfulness Meditation and Music Therapy

Cross-modal adaptation, sensory conflict that causes bodily adaptation and healing, may be used to facilitate relaxation. Previous research has shown that music and mindfulness meditation increase subjective relaxation and autonomic nervous system relaxation responses. It was hypothesized that mindfulness meditation would cause greater subjective relaxation and greater autonomic nervous system responses during relaxation than instrumental music therapy. College students listened to relaxing audio and answered a Relaxation Inventory survey after treatment to gauge their subjective relaxation responses. Analysis of four one-way ANOVAs found the hypothesis to be only partially supported. The Cognitive Tension Scale was the lone subsection to show a significant difference between the mindfulness meditation and control groups. These results suggest that cross-modal adaptation via mindfulness meditation is more effective for mental relaxation than a quiet break, but is not necessarily better than music therapy. There are many meditation and relaxation techniques used in the therapeutic world to help reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. Some of these mindfulness and meditation techniques have been adapted from Eastern religious practices to be used in Western medicine (Simkin & Black, 2014). Meditation has long been part of religious enlightenment practices for Buddhist and Hindu sects, but the practices of the Abrahamic religions may also create a sort of meditative state of consciousness, as seen in deep prayer or faith healing sessions. These meditation techniques can also increase subjective feelings of spirituality in practitioners (Geary & Rosenthal, 2011). Other relaxation therapies, such as music therapy and progressive muscle relaxation (PMR), have been used by psychologists to reduce stress and anxiety. PMR was shown to be effective in helping college students to relax (Dolbier & Rush, 2012). While inexperienced practitioners may still receive benefits, meditative practices have been shown to elicit greater responses in more experienced meditators (Davidson & Kaszniak, 2015; Dolbier & Rush, 2012). While there is evidence that each of these practices can assist with relaxation and reduction of negative symptoms, there is little data to explain why meditation, guided imagery, and music therapy work. Mindfulness meditation is a meditation and relaxation technique that involves paying attention to how one’s body exists at the present moment, often by focusing on one’s heartbeat or breath. Per Bedford's (2012) major theory review of mind-body interactions on perception, mindfulness meditation can be used as a means for cross-modal adaptation, meaning that sensory conflicts cause bodily adaptation for healing or other bodily responses. Bedford explains that this works in a similar way as vision and proprioception ISSUE: 2017 VOLUME: 1 Minnesota State University Moorhead is an equal opportunity educator and employer and is a member of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System. adaptation when looking through a prism. Looking through a prism causes one’s vision to be skewed to a certain degree. If a person is asked to point at an object viewed through a prism, the person’s arm will appear to be pointing at a different angle than the person’s proprioception, or relative bodily location, relays to the person’s brain. This sensory conflict causes cross-modal adaptation over time since the person’s proprioception must adapt to the skewed vision. This adaptation is evident after the prism is removed, because the person’s arm will point away from the target object in a skewed manner consistent with the degree of vision skew when the prism was present. The adaptation effect is reversed over time as the person’s normal vision causes the person’s proprioception to change back to normal. The body's understanding of itself adjusts to conflicted sensory inputs in order to survive and heal. This ability of the body to adjust is due to the immune system acting as the sixth sense. According to Blalock and Smith (2006), building on Blalock's landmark 1984 proposal that the immune system is the sixth sense, the immune system works as a sensory organ. Since the immune system can detect injuries or foreign objects in the body and react accordingly to keep the body healthy, mindfulness meditation could be used to influence the mind-body connection and, therefore, cause immune system responses. Knowing that mindfulness meditation could be used to create the sensory conflict necessary for cross-modal adaptation, it stands to reason that it could also be used to elicit autonomic nervous system responses via the same principle. This study provided further data to assist in understanding how mindfulness meditation and music therapy could influence relaxation. Music therapy has been used to help improve patient experience in many aspects of treatment, but researchers have little understanding of how music therapy affects listeners. Music relaxation has been used to help reduce anxiety and pain during medical procedures, such as gastrointestinal procedures, as well as reduce blood pressure (Salmore & Nelson, 2000). Playing relaxing music in hospitals has helped intensive care unit patients sleep better and lowers their heart rates (Su et al., 2012). In diabetes patients music therapy and music-assisted relaxation and imagery (MARI) have been shown to reduce stress levels more so than diabetes selfmanagement education/training (DSME/T) alone (Mandel, Davis, & Secic, 2013). Interestingly, patients’ musical preference does not change which music piece is most effective for relaxation purposes (Perez-Lloret et al., 2014). The current study compared meditation and music alone to see which, if either, was most effective for elicitation of autonomic nervous systems relaxation responses and subjective relaxation reporting. In order to biologically track the relaxation response, researchers in the current study wanted to use a finger pulse sensor to measure heart rate variability (HRV), which is a measure of individual differences between each beat of the heart. High-frequency HRV (HF-HRV) is an accepted mechanism for collecting and analyzing the relaxation responses of the autonomic nervous system. Tracking HF-HRV could therefore allow researchers to quantify relaxation without having to rely solely on subjective self-report from participants. Shearer, Hunt, Chowdhury, and Nicol (2015) found that meditation therapy had more effect on HRV than dog therapy. High-frequency HRV increases due to meditation have also been shown to be related to smoking cessation success (Libby, Worhunsky, Pilver, & Brewer, 2012). Peng, Koo, and Yu (2009) found that music therapy combined with aromatherapy led to increased HF-HRV responses during relaxation. Subjective perception is an important factor in stress, anxiety, and depression. Previous studies have found that meditation can lead to altered perceptions of time, space, and body in long-term practitioners The Red River PUBLISHED BY THE Psychology Journal MSUM PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT ISSUE: 2017 VOLUME: 1 RRJOURNAL@MNSTATE.EDU | MNSTATE.EDU/RRPSYCHJOURNAL (Berkovich-Ohana, Dor-Ziderman, Glicksohn, & Goldstein, 2013). Costa and Barnhofer (2015) found that mindfulness meditation reduces depression symptoms, but maintenance of the lowered symptoms requires further training. Costa and Barnhofer also suggested that overcoming negative thinking is the most important factor in depression symptom reduction, but the rapid reduction in symptoms is not a precursor to a full elimination of depression symptoms. Geary and Rosenthal's (2011) mindfulness study found increases in subjective spiritual experiences and reductions in self-reported stress even at follow-up a year after the treatment. There are limitations to the effectiveness of music therapy, mindfulness meditation, and the related meditation practices, though. One study found that participants with personalities labeled as perfectionist show decreased HRV responses to meditation relative to non-perfectionist participants (Azam et al., 2015). This shows that some people may not be able to let go of stressors as easily as others, depending on the situation and the participant's personality. Steinhubl et al. (2015) found decreases in HRV in response to meditation, which is the opposite of the expected result. These unexpected results might be due to troubles with data viability and differing analysis methods, according to researchers. The researchers did find, however, decreased blood pressure in response to meditation when using continuous wireless tracking devices (Steinhubl et al., 2015). Lumma, Kok, and Singer (2015) showed that some meditations are specifically meant to increase arousal rather than assist in relaxation. Likewise, some mindfulness meditation scripts and musical pieces have been created to elicit arousal responses or enhance certain aspects of life. Musical piece selection is important during music therapy, as Perez-Lloret et al. (2014) found that musical variations such as tempo and rhythm caused relaxation effects to wane, particularly when parts of the music were quickening. This study shows that even pieces of music thought to be “relaxing” may incorporate portions that excite listeners and, thereby, disrupt the relaxation process. The current study utilized slow and unvaried instrumental relaxation music, as well as mindfulness meditation scripts designed to decrease arousal, to isolate the relaxation effects of music and mindfulness meditation on the autonomic nervous system. Bedford (2011) noted that stronger perceptual conflicts caused stronger crossmodal adaptations. Since mindfulness meditation can be specifically scripted to create these strong perceptual conflicts while music cannot, it was hypothesized that mindfulness meditation would cause greater subjective relaxation and greater autonomic nervous system responses during re