Quantitative EEG Evidences Reveal an Effective Approach for Regulating Negative Emotions via Listening Mindfulness-Based Music

The detrimental effects of negative emotional states have prompted extensive research into developing effective emotion regulation strategies. Here, we introduced a standardized protocol via merging mindfulness prompts with soothing music for regulating negative emotions (i.e. sadness and fear) and investigated the underlying neural mechanisms during emotion regulation. Specifically, EEG data were obtained from 43 healthy participants (m/f = 18/25, age = 22.7 ± 2.2 yrs) throughout baseline (eyes-closed resting), emotion inducing (via watching sadness/fear film clips selected from SEED-IV dataset), and regulation (via listening customized mindfulness-based music) phases. Post-intervention questionnaire showed successful reduction of emotion-related negative valence and arousal. Following analyses revealed broad oscillatory dynamics across various frequency bands as well as network reorganizations, suggesting neural resource reallocation during regulation toward baseline. More importantly, the right-hemispheric lateralization of theta- and gamma-band power and theta-band global efficiency distinctions between sadness and fear highlighted emotion-specific regulatory pathways. In sum, these findings validate the effectiveness of the proposed synthesized mindfulness-music in emotion regulation and elucidate the corresponding spectro-topological reorganizations, paving the way for further exploratory investigations of personalized interventions targeting distinct negative emotions.