KARUNA... KARUNA... KARUNA...
ATLANTA, Oct 5
According to a study announced yesterday, a meditation program that focuses on compassion (KARUNA) was found to boost a person’s ability to read the facial expressions of others as well as activate regions in the brain that help us be more empathic.
“It’s an intriguing result, suggesting that a behavioral intervention could enhance a key aspect of empathy,” says lead author Jennifer Mascaro of Emory University in the US state of Georgia.
“Previous research has
shown that
both children and adults
who are better at reading
the
emotional expressions of others
have better relationships.”
Lobsang
Tenzin Negi
The meditation program is called Cognitively-Based Compassion
Training, or CBCT, and was developed at Emory by study co-author Lobsang
Tenzin Negi, director of the Emory-Tibet Partnership. Derived from
Tibetan Buddhist practices, the program (which is secular) includes
elements of concentration and non-judgmental awareness of thoughts and
feelings, similar to the much-talked-about mindfulness meditation. Yet
according to the university, the CBCT also focuses on training people to
analyze and reinterpret their relationships with others.
“The idea is that the feelings we have about people can be trained in
optimal ways,” Negi says.
“CBCT aims to condition one’s mind
to
recognize how we are all inter-dependent,
and that everybody desires to
be happy
and free from suffering at a deep level.”
KARUNA... KARUNA... KARUNA...
In the study, 13 subjects with no prior meditation experience were
randomized to CBCT meditation, where they completed regular weekly
training sessions and at-home practice for eight weeks. Eight subjects
in the control group didn’t meditate but attended health discussion
classes that covered the topics of stress and wellbeing.
All participants received MRI brain scans while completing a version
of a facial expression test called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes
Test (RMET), which consists of black-and-white photographs that feature
only the eyes of people making various expressions. Subjects were asked
to interpret what the person in the photograph is thinking or feeling.
These tests were performed before and after the meditation training.
According to the findings, those in the meditation group improved
their RMET scores by an average of 4.6 per cent, while the control group
showed no increase. The meditators, in comparison to the control group,
“also had significant increases in neural activity in areas of the
brain important for empathy, including the inferior frontal gyrus and
dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.”
“These findings raise the intriguing possibility
that CBCT may have
enhanced
empathic abilities by increasing activity
in parts of the brain that are of central
importance for our ability to recognize
the emotional states of others,”
empathic abilities by increasing activity
in parts of the brain that are of central
importance for our ability to recognize
the emotional states of others,”
says senior author Charles Raison.
—
AFP/Relaxnews
KARUNA... KARUNA... KARUNA...
