FRIDAY, May 31 (HealthDay News) -- Compassion can be taught, according to a study published online May 21 in Psychological Science.
Helen Y. Weng, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and colleagues examined whether compassion can be systematically trained by assessing whether short-term compassion training increases altruistic behavior. Additionally, whether individual differences in altruism are associated with training-induced changes in neural responses to suffering was assessed.
The researchers found that compassion training increased altruistic redistribution of funds to a victim encountered outside of the training context. With increased altruistic behavior after compassion training there was altered activation in brain regions implicated in social cognition and emotion regulation. The brain regions with altered activation included the inferior parietal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) as well as DLPFC connectivity with the nucleus accumbens.
"These results suggest that compassion can be cultivated with training and that greater altruistic behavior may emerge from increased engagement of neural systems implicated in understanding the suffering of other people, executive and emotional control, and reward processing," the authors write.
Abstract
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