Stability of Skin Resistance Responses One Week after Instruction in the Transcendental Meditation Technique

The purpose of this study was to test the longand short-term effects of the Transcendental Meditation technique on spontaneous skin resistance responses and habituation of evoked skin resistance responses. Measurements of spontaneous skin resistance responses and evoked skin resistance response habituation were taken on 24 experimental subjects just before and again one week after they were instructed in the Transcendental Meditation technique. Twenty-five control subjects were similarly measured on two occasions on.e week apart. Seven additional subjects, who had practiced the Transcendental Meditation technique for a mean of2 .05 years, and ten subjects who had practiced it for a mean of two months were similarly measured. All subjects were voluntarily recruited and screened by means of a questionnaire. After practicing Transcendental Meditation for one week, the experimental group significantly decreased in spontaneous skin resistance responses (p < .01) and in the number of trials before habituation to the evoked response stimulus (p < .01 ). The control group showed no significant change on either measure. The mean habituation time of the seven two-year meditators was about half that of the controls; however, the difference was not significant, perhaps due to the small sample size.