Mindfulness meditation regulates anterior insula activity during empathy for social pain

Abstract

Mindfulness has been shown to reduce stress, promote health, and well-being, as well as to increase compassionate behavior toward others. It reduces distress to one's own painful experiences, going along with altered neural responses, by enhancing self-regulatory processes and decreasing emotional reactivity. In order to investigate if mindfulness similarly reduces distress and neural activations associated with empathy for others' socially painful experiences, which might in the following more strongly motivate prosocial behavior, the present study compared trait, and state effects of long-term mindfulness meditation (LTM) practice. To do so we acquired behavioral data and neural activity measures using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during an empathy for social pain task while manipulating the meditation state between two groups of LTM practitioners that were matched with a control group. The results show increased activations of the anterior insula (AI) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) as well as the medial prefrontal cortex and temporal pole when sharing others' social suffering, both in LTM practitioners and controls. However, in LTM practitioners, who practiced mindfulness meditation just prior to observing others' social pain, left AI activation was lower and the strength of AI activation following the mindfulness meditation was negatively associated with trait compassion in LTM practitioners. The findings suggest that current mindfulness meditation could provide an adaptive mechanism in coping with distress due to the empathic sharing of others' suffering, thereby possibly enabling compassionate behavior. Hum Brain Mapp 38:4034-4046, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Mindfulness‐based cognitive therapy is associated with distinct resting‐state neural patterns in patients with generalized anxiety disorder

“…The possible mechanism may be due to the increased mindfulness ability of the patients after MBCT, and it promotes the perception and acceptance of somatic discomfort, which contributes to the alleviation of anxiety. This is consistent with previous reports that mindfulness may be related to unique structural and functional changes in the insular cortex (Friedel et al, ; Laneri et al, ; Mooneyham et al, ; Murakami, Nakao, Matsunaga, & Ohira, ).…”

A Radial Glia Fascicle Leads Principal Neurons from the Pallial-Subpallial Boundary into the Developing Human Insula

“…In any case, the human insula should be considered in the context of its complex cognitive, social and emotional functions, including empathy, altruistic behavior, self-awareness, interoception, mindfulness, and consciousness ( Craig, 2009 ; Fan et al, 2011 ; Fischer et al, 2016 ; Tusche et al, 2016 ; Laneri et al, 2017 ), or, as expressed by Craig (2010) , the “sentient-self.” In keeping with these human-specific functions, a volumetric comparison of the insula of human and non-human primates revealed that in terms of absolute volumes the left and right agranular insula are among the most enlarged cortical areas relative to the chimpanzee ( Bauernfeind et al, 2013 ). The degree of “granularity” of a cytoarchitectonic area is thus unrelated to its involvement in networks engaged in human cognitive functions such as those attributed to the anterior insula.…”

Predicting ovulation from brain connectivity: Dynamic causal modelling of the menstrual cycle

“…Then, during the pre-ovulatory phase related to the increased estradiol levels, this pattern reversed and the left insula increased its connectivity to posterior DMN, ACC and ECN, as the right insula decreased it (SI, table 1). Although the bilateral anterior insulae are involved in the response to all emotional stimuli, a left-hemisphere dominance for positive stimuli 58 and empathy 59 has been suggested, relating the lateralized pattern of insula coupling and decoupling to the ECN to menstrual cycle dependent changes in emotion processing 60 . During the luteal phase both insulae decoupled from the PCC as they increased the connectivity to each other.…”