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The effects of Heartfulness meditation on emotional and neural processes: Preliminary behavioral and fMRI findings

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Shiqi He¹, Aravind Komuravelli^2,4, Jayaram Thimmapuram^3,4, Jack Benton¹, Rebecca Elliott¹; ¹The University of Manchester, ²Mersey Care NHS Trust, ³WellSpan York Hospital, ⁴Heartfulness Institute

While mindfulness-based meditation has been widely studied, little research has systematically examined Heartfulness meditation, a contemplative practice that cultivates inner peace, emotional balance, and regulation of mind through a deeper connection to the heart. This study investigates how six weeks of Heartfulness meditation training and practice influence emotional processing, psychological well-being, and neural activity compared with a non-meditating control condition. Data collection was completed in July 2025 with 39 participants (20 Heartfulness practitioners, 19 controls). Before and after the six-week intervention, participants completed self-report questionnaires assessing mindfulness, depression, stress, anxiety, and happiness. They also performed cognitive tasks, including an emotion-recognition task and an N-back working-memory task. During fMRI scanning, participants completed an emotion-response task to examine how meditation training modulates brain responses to emotional stimuli, as well as an N-back task to assess working memory and attention-related responses. Preliminary behavioral analyses indicate that the Heartfulness group showed significantly higher mindfulness scores and reduced depressive symptoms after the six-week training period, while the control group showed minimal change. Early task results suggest slightly faster responses to negative facial expressions in the meditation group post-training, consistent with improved emotional awareness. This pattern may reflect enhanced attentional flexibility and reduced emotional interference following Heartfulness practice. Ongoing fMRI analyses will examine hypothesized changes in amygdala–prefrontal connectivity during emotion processing and sustained attention challenges, further clarifying how Heartfulness meditation shapes the neural dynamics of emotional regulation.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions