Where is an emotion? Using body focus as a method of improving emotion regulation to inform suicide prevention initiatives

Visceroceptive awareness intervention. This involves directing attention to the physiological activity of a part of the body, where these parts differ across experimental groups. One group will focus attention on cardiac activity with another group focussing on gut activity in the lower abdomen. These groups undertake the intervention over an extended period of 8 weeks, 6 days per week, 20 minutes per day. Participants will be provided with written instructions online (developed by the Principal Investigator) for how to approach this daily task. These instructions will include the body posture to adopt during each session, the focal point for the task (being either cardiac or gastrointestinal, not skeletal), ensuring the set up in the room is comfortable (e.g. comfortable temperature, comfortable and stable chair), and common pitfalls when undertaking meditation (e.g. mind wandering). When beginning the task, participants in the cardiac focus group will be cued with an image highlighting the chest area, with those in the gut focus group being cued by an image highlighting the lower abdomen. They will be instructed to focus within the body at these locations. Further, there will be opportunities for participants to ask questions face to face and/or over email. The intervention (and knowledge of group allocation) will be introduced during an initial laboratory visit, which will be reinforced by the online materials. The first meditation session takes place after the initial laboratory visit. The Principal Investigator (PI) has based the intervention on instructions provided in journal articles using visceroception, in combination with a meditation framework taken from a traditional Zen Buddhist practice (the PI has 20 years' experience of this framework with the Zen Centre, London). This framework will be used to fix the bodily posture (upright position, curved lower back, chest out, ears in line with the shoulders, eyes lowered, one hand gripping the other in the lap) and set the environmental conditions for each daily session (room temperature, medium level lighting, no noise or other distractions such as food, and ensuring a comfortable room temperature) as well as some guidance on what is meant by focussing attention on physiological activity (i.e. emphasising the difference between attending to bodily locations and thinking about those locations). The intervention will take place in the participants' own home, using their own computer to access an online guided task. The task includes responding to several questions about any changes in emotional experience throughout the study period. In terms of adherence, all participants will be logging in to a website to complete the daily task. Each log in is automatically recorded, including time spent and all activities within the session. This includes the responses to the questions indicated previously. In the event that participants do not log in for more than 2 consecutive days, they will be contacted by the researcher. Further, at the 4-week midpoint, the researcher will contact each participant to check for any issues or difficulties they may be experiencing. This will be a brief Skype conversation or, otherwise, an email exchange.