Mindfulness and empathy

Even as mindfulness is becoming ubiquitous -- popular with businesses, physicians, and stressed-out average joes -- empathy is declining.

In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof cites the work of a Princeton University psychology professor, Susan Fiske, who found that when research subjects look at photos of the poor and homeless, brain imaging shows they often react as if they are seeing things, not people. Her analysis suggests that Americans sometimes react to poverty not with sympathy but with revulsion.

Instead of seeing the similarities -- there but for the grace of God go I -- we look for differences, for explanations to reassure ourselves that whatever led to other people being in difficult circumstances won't happen to us.

Mindfulness, though, should lead us in the other direction. Seeing how we want to be happy, to be safe, to live at peace and how many of our thoughts are about that and how we can secure it opens us up and lets us know how much others also want that.  Mindfulness -- kind, non-judgmental, present-moment awareness -- lets us see how we suffer. It's only a small step to see that others also want what we want and suffer when they don't have it. All we have to do, really, is to extend kind awareness to others.

And when we see the world through the lens of mindfulness, we also are more clear about how we can reduce suffering, our own and others'.

When mindfulness is equated with bare attention, it can easily lead to the misconception that the cultivation of mindfulness has nothing to do with ethics or with the cultivation of wholesome states of mind and the attenuation of unwholesome states. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

- B. Alan Wallace

We should be courteous to the poor as well as to the powerful. We should avoid attachment to relatives and animosity toward enemies, ridding ourselves of all partiality. But let us be especially respectful towards poor, humble people of no importance. Do not be partial! Love and compassion should be universal toward all beings.

Dilgo Kyentse Rinpoche

Compassion can be learned

Researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison set out to learn whether adults can learn to be compassionate and whether training can lead to greater altruistic behavior and related changes in neural systems underlying compassion.

Helen Weng, lead author of the study and a graduate student in clinical psychology, says, “Our evidence points to yes.”

The researchers trained young adults in what they term "compassion meditation," in which they envisioned a time when someone has suffered and then practiced wishing that the suffering was relieved. They repeated phrases to help them focus on compassion such as, “May you be free from suffering. May you have joy and ease.” They practiced this with various subjects, including themselves, loved ones, strangers, and difficult people. (This is similar to lovingkindness, or metta, meditation in Buddhism.)

They practiced for 30 minutes a day, using guided meditations over the Internet. The results were compared to a control group who learned "cognitive reappraisal," or reframing their thoughts to feel less negative.

“It’s kind of like weight training,” Weng says. “Using this systematic approach, we found that people can actually build up their compassion ‘muscle’ and respond to others’ suffering with care and a desire to help.”

The research tested this by asking the participants to play a game in which they were given the opportunity to spend their own money to respond to someone in need (called the “Redistribution Game”). They played the game over the Internet with two anonymous players, the “Dictator” and the “Victim.” They watched as the Dictator shared an unfair amount of money (only $1 out of $10) with the Victim. They then decided how much of their own money to spend (out of $5) in order to equalize the unfair split and redistribute funds from the Dictator to the Victim.

“We found that people trained in compassion were more likely to spend their own money altruistically to help someone who was treated unfairly than those who were trained in cognitive reappraisal,” Weng says.

What distinguishes this study is that researchers found actual physical changes in participants' magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and after training, the researchers measured how much brain activity had changed during the training. The biggest change was found in people who were the most altruistic after compassion training. They had increase activity in the inferior parietal cortex, a region involved in empathy and understanding others. Compassion training also increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the extent to which it communicated with the nucleus accumbens, brain regions involved in emotion regulation and positive emotions.

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“People seem to become more sensitive to other people’s suffering, but this is challenging emotionally. They learn to regulate their emotions so that they approach people’s suffering with caring and wanting to help rather than turning away,” explains Weng.

UW-Madison psychology and psychiatry professor Richard J. Davidson, founder and chair of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and senior author of the article. said that “the fact that alterations in brain function were observed after just a total of seven hours of training is remarkable.”

Davidson foresees benefits from compassion training in schools, where it could decrease bullying, as well as with people who have social anxiety or anti-social behaviors. But even those with no obvious problems could benefit. Imagine if everyone became more compassionate and aware of others' suffering?

It's not a difficult practice, as long as you don't insist on fMRIs to prove progress. Visit a meditation center or try a metta meditation on youtube. Commit to doing it every day for two weeks, and see if you notice a change in your life.

Here's a guided metta meditation from Sharon Salzberg, a gifted and accessible teacher.

Meditators are nicer

People meditate for lots of reasons -- to reach enlightenment, to lower their blood pressure, reduce anxiety, relieve stress. Most don't sit in order to be nicer to others, but a new study shows that meditation can have that effect.

A team of researchers at Northeastern University recruited 36 people who said they were interested in meditation. Half, the control group, were told they were on a wait list. The other half were given eight weeks of meditation instruction, with half of that group also involved in discussions of Buddhist teachings on compassion and sufferings.

To test the effects, subjects were told to come to an office; the waiting room had three chairs, two occupied by actors involved in the experiment. The subject naturally took the third chair, and another actor -- on crutches and with a look of pain -- came in.

The study found that about 15 per­cent of the non-meditators – the wait-­listed group – got up and offered their seat to the suf­ferer com­pared to about 50 per­cent of those in both med­i­ta­tion groups – those who engaged in dis­cus­sions about com­pas­sion and those who only par­tic­i­pated in med­i­ta­tion training. The results sug­gest that it was the med­i­ta­tion itself — not the discussions — that accounted for the increase.

The research team is now looking at why meditators were more likely to give up their seats.It could be related to a height­ened aware­ness of one’s sur­round­ings or an increased sense of empathy, they speculate.

“This is the first evi­dence that the prac­tice of meditation—even for brief periods of time—increases peo­ples’ respon­sive­ness and moti­va­tion to relieve the suf­fering of others,” psychology professor David DeSteno said.

Meditation has lasting effects

The changes that take place in the brain during meditation -- reduced activity in the amygdala, which regulates stress response, for instance -- continue after a meditation session ends, according to a research study published this month in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Researchers at Massachusetts General, Boston College, and other participating institutions also found differences in the brain activity of those who practiced mindfulness-awareness meditation and those who did compassion practices during meditation sessions.

“The two different types of meditation training our study participants completed yielded some differences in the response of the amygdala – a part of the brain known for decades to be important for emotion – to images with emotional content,” says Gaëlle Desbordes, PhD, a research fellow at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH and at the BU Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology, corresponding author of the report. “This is the first time that meditation training has been shown to affect emotional processing in the brain outside of a meditative state.”

Participants in three groups took part in eight-week trainings in either mindfulness-awareness meditation, compassion meditation, or general health classes. They had brain-imaging tests before and after the programs as they viewed photographs.

In the mindful attention group, the after-training brain scans showed a decrease in activation in the right amygdala in response to all images, supporting the hypothesis that meditation can improve emotional stability and response to stress. In the compassion meditation group, right amygdala activity also decreased in response to positive or neutral images. But among those who reported practicing compassion meditation most frequently outside of the training sessions, right amygdala activity tended to increase in response to negative images – all of which depicted some form of human suffering. No significant changes were seen in the control group or in the left amygdala of any study participants.

“We think these two forms of meditation cultivate different aspects of mind,” Desbordes explains. “Since compassion meditation is designed to enhance compassionate feelings, it makes sense that it could increase amygdala response to seeing people suffer. Increased amygdala activation was also correlated with decreased depression scores in the compassion meditation group, which suggests that having more compassion towards others may also be beneficial for oneself. Overall, these results are consistent with the overarching hypothesis that meditation may result in enduring, beneficial changes in brain function, especially in the area of emotional processing.”

Read more at http://scienceblog.com/57623/meditation-makes-lasting-change-in-brain/#i4Hedt7PxM30TklV.99