Human brain can be trained to be more compassionate

Washington, May 23 (ANI): Until now, little was scientifically known about the human potential to cultivate compassion.

A new study by researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that adults can be trained to be more compassionate.

The report investigates whether training adults in compassion can result in greater altruistic behavior and related changes in neural systems underlying compassion.

“Our fundamental question was, ‘Can compassion be trained and learned in adults? Can we become more caring if we practice that mindset?’” Helen Weng, lead author of the study and a graduate student in clinical psychology, said. “Our evidence points to yes.”

In the study, the investigators trained young adults to engage in compassion meditation, an ancient Buddhist technique to increase caring feelings for people who are suffering.

In the meditation, participants envisioned a time when someone has suffered and then practiced wishing that his or her suffering was relieved.

They repeated phrases to help them focus on compassion such as, “May you be free from suffering. May you have joy and ease.”

Participants practiced with different categories of people, first starting with a loved one, someone whom they easily felt compassion for, like a friend or family member.

Then, they practiced compassion for themselves and, then, a stranger.

Finally, they practiced compassion for someone they actively had conflict with called the “difficult person,” such as a troublesome coworker or roommate.

“It’s kind of like weight training,” Weng said.

“Using this systematic approach, we found that people can actually build up their compassion ‘muscle’ and respond to others’ suffering with care and a desire to help,” she said.

Compassion training was compared to a control group that learned cognitive reappraisal, a technique where people learn to reframe their thoughts to feel less negative. Both groups listened to guided audio instructions over the Internet for 30 minutes per day for two weeks.

“We wanted to investigate whether people could begin to change their emotional habits in a relatively short period of time,” Weng said.

The real test of whether compassion could be trained was to see if people would be willing to be more altruistic – even helping people they had never met.

The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. (ANI)

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