Investigating the Impact of a Mindfulness Intervention on Rumination Patterns via a Source Imaging Approach
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Overview
Overview
abstract
To determine the structures involved in rumination a source-imaging approach was adopted using surface EEG signals. For the purpose of this paper, 17 participants were included: 9 from the low-ruminating group and 8 from the high-ruminating group. Data from the remaining 63
participants will be collected and analyzed for future publication. Participants performed rumination questionnaires, followed by in-lab EEG sessions where their brain activity was measured during resting state for 5 minutes. During the resting-state data collection, the participants were asked to close their eyes and relax; this was to minimize the effects of blink artifacts and lateral eye movements within the data.Using a Linearly Constrained Minimal Variance (LCMV) beamformer, the participant’s EEG data was analyzed within spatial coordinates to determine regions of increased neural activation while at a resting state. The findings determine that there were visual differences between the low-ruminating and the high-ruminating group, most notably the increased activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in the low-ruminating group and the increased activation of limbic structures in the high-ruminating group. Although differences are shown through visual inspection, the validity of the study can be improved with the inclusion of statistical analyses comparing the high activation regions between both the low-ruminating and high-ruminating group. This study was able to provide evidence that beamforming can be used to determine the structures involved in rumination
and opens avenues for future research within this field including determining whether a statistically significant difference in rumination patterns can be observed after a mindfulness intervention. This will be investigated in a future publication.
