The neural correlates of two forms of spiritual love: an EEG study

Abstract

Spiritual practices are gaining an increasingly wider audience as a means to enhance positive affect in healthy individuals and to treat neurological disorders such as anxiety and depression. The current study aimed to examine the neural correlates of two different forms of love generated by spiritual practices using EEG; love generated during a loving kindness meditation performed by Buddhist meditators, and love generated during prayer, in a separate group of participants from a Christian-based faith. The loving kindness meditation was associated with significant increases in delta, alpha 1, alpha 2 and beta power compared to baseline, while prayer induced significant increases in power of alpha 1 and gamma oscillations, together with an increase in the gamma: theta ratio. An increase in delta activity occurred during the loving kindness meditation but not during prayer. In contrast increases in theta, alpha 1, alpha 2, beta and gamma power were observed when comparing both types of practice to baseline, suggesting that increases in these frequency bands are the neural correlates of spiritual love, independent of the type of practice used to attain the state of this type of love. These findings show that both spiritual love practices are associated with widespread changes in neural activity across the brain, in particular at frequency ranges that have been implicated in positive emotional experience, integration of distributed neural activity, and changes in short-term and longterm neural circuitry.