Abstract
Although kindness-based contemplative practices are increasingly employed by clinicians and cognitive researchers to enhance prosocial emotions, social cognitive skills, and well-being, and as a tool to understand the basic workings of the social mind, we lack a coherent theoretical model with which to test the mechanisms by which kindness-based meditation may alter the brain and body. Here, we link contemplative accounts of compassion and loving-kindness practices with research from social cognitive neuroscience and social psychology to generate predictions about how diverse practices may alter brain structure and function and related aspects of social cognition. Contingent on the nuances of the practice, kindness-based meditation may enhance the neural systems related to faster and more basic perceptual or motor simulation processes, simulation of another’s affective body state, slower and higher-level perspective-taking, modulatory processes such as emotion regulation and self/other discrimination, and combinations thereof. This theoretical model will be discussed alongside best practices for testing such a model and potential implications and applications of future work.
Highlights
Over the last 25 years, research on meditation has advanced in domains both clinical and basic, motivated by an often implicit conviction that mindfulness and attention practices are effective interventions for remediating psychopathology and augmenting well-being and resilience, and may be used as tools to help scientists understand the human brain, body, and brain–body connections
There is a growing body of research on the effects and efficacy of kindness-based contemplative practices including compassion (CM) and loving-kindness (LKM) meditation [reviewed in Hofmann et al (2011) and Galante et al (2014)], a handful of which are studies exploring their effects on neural structure and function (Lutz et al, 2008a; Desbordes et al, 2012; Klimecki et al, 2013b,c; Mascaro et al, 2013b; Weng et al, 2013; Garrison et al, 2014)
This sub-field remains in its infancy, and missing from this research are coherent theoretical models with which to test the mechanisms by which these meditation practices may alter the brain and body
Summary
Over the last 25 years, research on meditation has advanced in domains both clinical and basic, motivated by an often implicit conviction that mindfulness and attention practices are effective interventions for remediating psychopathology and augmenting well-being and resilience, and may be used as tools to help scientists understand the human brain, body, and brain–body connections. There is a growing body of research on the effects and efficacy of kindness-based contemplative practices including compassion (CM) and loving-kindness (LKM) meditation [reviewed in Hofmann et al (2011) and Galante et al (2014)], a handful of which are studies exploring their effects on neural structure and function (Lutz et al, 2008a; Desbordes et al, 2012; Klimecki et al, 2013b,c; Mascaro et al, 2013b; Weng et al, 2013; Garrison et al, 2014) This sub-field remains in its infancy, and missing from this research are coherent theoretical models with which to test the mechanisms by which these meditation practices may alter the brain and body. It is generally agreed that empathy and/or compassion can lead to www.frontiersin.org
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