Effect of japa on emotion regulation

Abstract

Background Emotion regulation is an important feature of mental health. It became one of the great challenges in present generation. Regulating the emotions maintains the mental and psychological health. But if the regulating emotion is itself becomes a problem, then the negative emotions arises and leads to the emergence of psychosomatic disorders like stress, depression, border personality disorders, bipolar disorders, social anxiety disorders and eating disorders etc. It is possible to not experience the symptoms of psychosomatic disorders, but it is possible when we reappraise the emotion instead of suppressing. Suppression leads to the arise of negative emotions and it shows the negative impact on the memory whereas appraisal is the process of changing how we think about a situation in order to decrease its emotional impact. This study taken the Japa as a tool to reappraise the emotions in high school children. Aim The purpose of the present study was to assess the role of Jala in emotion regulation. Methodology In this one group pre-post study, 20 subjects, girl’s 14.4±1.17 and boy’s 14.7±0.82 years of mean age participated. The first day of intervention, the implicit measures, the Emotion regulation-Implicit association test data was collected through the computers and the explicit measures, the emotion regulation questionnaire and vedic personality inventory were collected manually. Japa was given to the students for 20 minutes in the morning and 10, minutes for preparation. The intervention period was for 43 days and the last day of the intervention the post data was collected Results The Emotion Regulation IAT (ER-IAT) has three variables, D score, average latency, and error percentage. The D score ranges from -2 to +2, and positive score indicates stronger implicit tendency towards emotion regulation, and negative score indicates stronger implicit tendency towards emotion expressive. The mean D score has increased which indicates overall improvement in implicit measure. However, the difference is marginal. Both the error rates and average latency have reduced after the Japa intervention. Cognitive reappraisal and Emotion expressive domains showed marginal decrease. In gunas, Satwa increased and Rajas and Tamas reduced. We also did a sub group analysis gender wise. We found that boys were benefited by japa intervention more than girls, both in implicit and explicit domains. However, the difference is not statistically significant. Also considering the gunas, in both the genders, satwa has increases whereas rajas has decreased. Tamas however, increased only in boys. Pre-post difference is shown using paired sample t-test. After checking for normality, we decided to do parametric tests. The results showed significant difference only in Satwa and rajas, and all other variables were not improved significantly. We also did Independent sample t-test to check gender differences for all the variables, and found only average latency to be significantly lower in boys (p = 0.019) and Satwa being statistically higher in girls (p = 0.044). No other variables were found to be statistically significant. Conclusion This study has shown the positive change on the high school children. The japa practice influenced the implicit measures as well as explicit measure. But the results are not statistically significant.