Compassion Training Alters Altruism and Neural Responses to Suffering

Abstract

Compassion is a key motivator of altruistic behavior, but little is known about individuals’ capacity to cultivate compassion through training. We examined whether compassion may be systematically trained by testing whether (i) short-term compassion training increases altruistic behavior, and (ii) individual differences in altruism are associated with training-induced changes in neural responses to suffering. In healthy young adults, we found that compassion training increased altruistic redistribution of funds to a victim encountered outside of the training context. Furthermore, greater altruistic behavior after compassion training was associated with altered activation in regions implicated in social cognition and emotion regulation, including the inferior parietal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and DLPFC connectivity with the nucleus accumbens. These results suggest that compassion can be cultivated with training, where greater altruistic behavior may emerge from increased engagement in neural systems implicated in understanding the suffering of others, executive and emotional control, and reward processing.

Why and how is compassion necessary to provide good quality healthcare?

“…This could sometimes even lead to them violating socially accepted norms (28) as they are working towards meeting impersonal organisational targets (29). However, compassion can be cultivated through training that increases altruistic behaviour in compassion trainees via neural mechanisms controlling emotion prompting them to respond to rather than avoid suffering of others (30). The proposal to incentivise compassion proposed by the UK government to address the failures of care (3) will not succeed if it is not geared to promote prosocial behaviour but rather to implement target measures that have induced the failure of compassion in the first place.…”

Buddhist-Derived Loving-Kindness and Compassion Meditation for the Treatment of Psychopathology: a Systematic Review

“…Of the 54 papers that underwent a full-text review, the five most common reasons for exclusion were that the study: (i) featured a single-dose adapted LKM or CM experimental test rather than training as part of a program of psychotherapy (e.g., Barnhofer, Chittka, Nightingale, Visser, & Crane, 2010;Crane, Jandric, Barnhofer, & Williams, 2010;Engström, & Söderfeldt, 2010;Feldman, Greeson, & Senville, 2010;Hutcherson et al, 2008;Lee et al, 2012;Logie & Frewen, 2014), (ii) utilized an intervention integrating lovingkindness and/or compassion techniques that was not based on meditation (e.g., Gilbert & Procter, 2006;Leiberg et al, 2011;Mayhew & Gilbert, 2008;Oman, Thoresen, & Hedberg, 2010), (iii) was not designed to explicitly assess changes in the symptom severity of DSM-IV-TR Axis I disorders in clinical samples and/or known concomitants thereof in subclinical/healthy samples (e.g., Condon, Desbordes, Miller, & DeSteno, 2013;Hunsinger, Livingston, & Isbell, 2013;Mascaro, Rilling, Negi, & Raison, 2013b;May et al, 2011;Weng et al, 2013), (iv) was primarily based on self-compassion techniques (e.g., Albertson, Neff, & Dill-Shackleford, 2014;Neff & Germer, 2013;Shapira, & Mongraina, 2010), or (v) was not published in a peer-reviewed journal (e.g., Humphrey, 1999;Kleinman, 2011;Law, 2012;Templeton, 2007;Weibel, 2008).…”

Brief loving-kindness meditation reduces racial bias, mediated by positive other-regarding emotions

“…Similarly, Weng et al (2013) showed that LKM increased altruistic redistribution of funds to a 'victim' figure encountered outside the training context. If LKM increases prosociality, inter-group processes would appear to be an area of human life likely to benefit from such an effect.…”