Cultivating compassion: the effects of compassion- and mindfulness-based meditation on pro-social mental states and behavior.
Permanent URL:
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20005093
Barrett, Lisa Feldman (Committee member)
Shansky, Rebecca M. (Committee member)
Vago, David R. (Committee member)
Even as scientists have begun to examine the effects of meditation on prosocial outcomes, the conclusions that can be drawn with respect to compassion have been limited by designs that lack real-time person-to person interactions centered on suffering or designs that employ self-report measures that are biased due to recall errors (e.g, over the past week, the past month, or an entire lifetime). Previous work has utilized meditators' self-reported intentions and motivations to behave in supportive manners toward others and computer-based games requiring economic generosity to assess altruistic action. Such methods suggest that meditation may increase generalized prosocial responding but have not objectively and clearly gauged responses meant to mitigate the suffering of other individuals.
To address this gap, two studies examined whether meditation practices increase compassionate behaviors and mental states in ecological valid settings outside of the laboratory. In Study 1, I utilized a design in which participants were confronted with a person in pain using actresses to construct a real-world orchestrated scenario. Participants with little to no prior meditation experience were randomly assigned to an eight-week course on compassion- or mindfulness-based meditation or a non-meditation wait-list control. At the end of the study, participants arrived at a lab individually to complete purported measures of cognitive ability. Upon entering a communal waiting area for many research labs, participants seated themselves in the last remaining chair in a row of three; confederates occupied the other two chairs. As the participant sat and waited, a third confederate using crutches and a large walking boot entered the waiting area while displaying discomfort. I assessed compassionate responding by whether participants gave up their seat to allow the confederate with crutches to sit, thereby relieving her pain. As predicted, participants who completed a meditation course gave up their seat more frequently than did those from the wait-list control.
Study 2 aimed to build on the previous finding by testing whether participation in an eight-week meditation course increased compassionate responding toward a difficult target following an interpersonal conflict in the laboratory. Study 2 also examined the effect of meditation on subjective experience (e.g., anger, compassion) in daily life and physiological responding to the interpersonal conflict. Contrary to prediction, those who completed a meditation course were not more likely than controls to behave compassionately toward the rude individual. Those practicing compassion meditation experienced the longest cardiovascular recovery. It may be that compassion meditation prolongs arousal in response to an angering event. Finally, as predicted, those completing compassion meditation experienced more compassion in their daily lives compared with those completing the mindfulness course or a non-meditation control course. In sum, this work provides the first evidence that brief-meditation training can increase compassionate responses to the suffering of others in real time, but there may be boundaries to that limit the scope of compassionate responding.
Helping
Mindfulness
Psychophysiology
Health Psychology
Social Psychology
Meditation -- Health aspects
Meditation -- Psychology
Compassion -- Research
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