Abstract
The ability to infer and understand the mental states of others (i.e., Theory of Mind) is a cornerstone of human interaction. While considerable efforts have focused on explicating when, why and for whom this fundamental psychological ability can go awry, considerably less is known about factors that may enhance theory of mind. Accordingly, the current study explored the possibility that mindfulness-based meditation may improve people’s mindreading skills. Following a 5-minute mindfulness induction, participants with no prior meditation experience completed tests that assessed mindreading and empathic understanding. The results revealed that brief mindfulness meditation enhanced both mental state attribution and empathic concern, compared to participants in the control group. These findings suggest that mindfulness may be a powerful technique for facilitating core aspects of social-cognitive functioning.
Highlights
Interpersonal success rests on the mind’s remarkable ability to decode and comprehend other people’s mental states
Mindfulness interventions have been shown to remediate a range of clinical problems and to impact core aspects of social cognition
One task, ‘The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test’ [19], assessed participants’ ability to decode emotions and mental states from subtle facial cues
Summary
Interpersonal success rests on the mind’s remarkable ability to decode and comprehend other people’s mental states. Nasal administrations of oxytocin, reading literary fiction, and extended compassion-based training have all been shown to enhance ToM [7,8,9] Extending this line of inquiry, here we considered whether a brief period of mindfulness-based meditation would improve mindreading performance. Cortical regions that support mindreading and self-referential mental activity (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex, temporal parietal junction) play a prominent functional role during mindfulness meditation [2,15,16,17]. The other task, ‘The Cyberball Social Exclusion Game’ [20] explored their capacity to empathize with others Adoption of these tasks enabled us to consider the effects of mindfulness on two pivotal components of ToM, mental state attribution and empathic understanding [3]. Only a brief mindfulness-intervention was employed (see [21])
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