An eight-week meditation programme led women to experience more empathy for strangers, suggesting that meditation can improve our ability to understand and experience other people鈥檚 feelings.
鈥淲hen you practise mindfulness meditation, these feelings of connectivity and empathy and compassion arise naturally. It is like a side effect almost,鈥� says at the University of California, San Diego. This type of meditation is the practice of focusing attention on the present moment by observing sensations like the breath and is believed to reduce people鈥檚 sense of self and help them connect with others.
Zeidan and his colleagues investigated whether meditation enhances empathy in a group of women and their romantic partners. The researchers used a specialised tool that mimics the sensation of burning without damaging the skin to cause pain in 29 women, their partners and a group of strangers. While having their brain scanned, the women then watched videos of the others experiencing the painful stimulus and recorded how unpleasant it was to do so 鈥� a metric of empathy 鈥� on a scale of 0 to 10.
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On average, they reported 49 per cent more empathy for their partner than for a stranger. They also had greater activity in the precuneus, a brain region involved in sense of self, when observing their partners than when viewing strangers. This suggests that the participants embodied their partner, which in turn allowed them to feel more empathy for them, says Zeidan.
Previous research has suggested that regularly practicing mindfulness meditation can outside of meditation. To further investigate this, the researchers had 17 of the participants complete eight weeks of training in mindfulness meditation, with weekly two-and-a-half-hour sessions and 45 minutes of daily homework. The researchers repeated the pain experiments halfway through the meditation programme and at its end.
At both time points, the women reported experiencing a higher level of empathy for both strangers and their romantic partner, though it raised much more for the strangers, so there was no longer a statistically significant difference between the two. While the researchers are still analysing the participants鈥� brain scans, Zeidan says this suggests that even four weeks of consistent mindfulness meditation can boost empathy. He presented these findings at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago on 8 October.
However, at Georgetown University in Washington DC says that because the study didn鈥檛 include a control group, we can鈥檛 say whether mindfulness meditation or some other factor, such as simply participating in a scientific study that focuses on empathy, led to increases in empathy.
