The publicly available Wearables Stress and Affect Detection (WESAD) dataset provides physiological and psychological measurements from 15 human subjects. Half the subjects did a comedy-viewing task and a meditation task before social stress, while half only did those after social stress.
Used principal component analysis (PCA) to extract putative sympathetic nervous system activity (2nd component in the below figures).
Comparing this sympathetic nervous system activity to subjective arousal reveals a complex effect of recent meditation and/or amusement on the interaction of phsyiological arousal with subjective cognitive arousal.
Overall, it appears meditation buffered against hyperactivity of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), allowing high subjective arousal while keeping sympathetic tone relatively low. (A t-test on this 2-dimensional representation of arousal controlled for SNS activity revealed an effect of meditation/amusement with a p-value of p=0.002)