Effect of Compassion Meditation on Neuroendocrine, Innate Immune and Behavioral Responses to Psychosocial Stress

By T. Pace, L. Negi, D. Adame, S. Cole, Teresa I. Sivilli, Timothy D. Brown, Michael J. Issa, Charles L Raison. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2008

714 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Meditation practices may impact physiological pathways that are modulated by stress and relevant to disease. While much attention has been paid to meditation practices that emphasize calming the mind, improving focused attention, or developing mindfulness, less is known about meditation practices that foster compassion. Accordingly, the current study examined the effect of compassion meditation on innate immune, neuroendocrine and behavioral responses to psychosocial stress and evaluated the degree to which engagement in meditation practice influenced stress-reactivity. Sixty-one healthy adults were randomized to 6 weeks of training in compassion meditation (n=33) or participation in a health discussion control group (n=28) followed by exposure to a standardized laboratory stressor (Trier Social Stress Test [TSST]). Physiologic and behavioral responses to the TSST were determined by repeated assessments of plasma concentrations of interleukin (IL)-6 and cortisol as well as total distress scores on the Profile of Mood States (POMS). No main effect of group assignment on TSST responses was found for IL-6, cortisol or POMS scores. However, within the meditation group, increased meditation practice was correlated with decreased TSST-induced IL-6 (rp =-0.46, p=0.008) and POMS distress scores (rp =-0.43, p=0.014). Moreover, individuals with meditation practice times above the median exhibited lower TSST-induced IL-6 and POMS distress scores compared to individuals below the median, who did not differ from controls. These data suggest that engagement in compassion meditation may reduce stress-induced immune and behavioral responses, although future studies are required to determine whether individuals who engage in compassion meditation techniques are more likely to exhibit reduced stress reactivity.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Clinical Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3994ca4a388bee774aec61aceffa84ed3a58c1a

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Citations in the corpus

Can Paranoid Thoughts be Reduced by Targeting Negative Emotions and Self-Esteem? An Experimental Investigation of a Brief Compassion-Focused Intervention (2013, background): “Pace et al. (2009) whose participants underwent a 6 week compassion training found only those with higher practice times to benefit in terms of reduced stress-induced immune and behavioural responses.”
Buddhist-Derived Loving-Kindness and Compassion Meditation for the Treatment of Psychopathology: a Systematic Review (2015, background): “The first eligible RCT assessed the effects of Cognitivebased Compassion Training (CBCT) on stress reactivity in 89 healthy adults (aged 17–19 years; mean age=18.5 years, SD= 0.62 years) (Pace et al. 2009).”
Mindfulness and other Buddhist-derived interventions in correctional settings: A systematic review (2013, methodology): “For example, in an RCT of a six-week long compassion meditation program (based on the Tibetan Buddhist ‘Mind Training’ technique), Pace et al (2009) demonstrated that meditators (healthy adults) experienced significant reductions in adverse psychosomatic responses to psychosocial stress.”
Open, aware, and active: contextual approaches as an emerging trend in the behavioral and cognitive therapies. (2011, background): “F or p er so na l u se o nl y. meditation (Pace et al. 2009), and Compassionate Mind Therapy (Gilbert 2009).”
Brain-gut interactions in inflammatory bowel disease. (2013, background): “Compassion meditation decreases inflammatory (IL-6) responses to a psychosocial laboratory stressor (157).”
Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) (2019, methodology): “A second randomized controlled trial of MSC was conducted by Friis, Johnson, Cutfield and Consedine (2016), which examined people suffering from type 1 and type 2 diabetes (N”
Cognitive-Based Compassion Training: A Promising Prevention Strategy for At-Risk Adolescents (2013, background): “demonstrated greater decreases in levels of circulating inflammatory markers and behavioral distress following CBCT training (Pace et al. 2009).”
Promoting Altruism Through Meditation: An 8-Week Randomized Controlled Pilot Study (2013, background): “Pace et al. (2009), however, examined the effects of compassion meditation drawn from the practice of Lojong, but only in the context of altered stress responses and not related empathy or altruism.”
Investigating the Phenomenological Matrix of Mindfulness-related Practices from a Neurocognitive Perspective (2015, background): “…these results, in a randomized active control (health education) longitudinal study of compassion-based meditation, Pace et al. (Pace et al., 2010; Pace et al., 2009) found decreased IL-6 and cortisol activations after the TSST in the meditation training group, but only for those who practiced…”
From Stress to Inflammation and Major Depressive Disorder: A Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression (2014, background): “Although there were no between-group effects, within the meditation group greater meditation practice was associated with fewer social stressinduced increases in IL-6 and emotional distress (Pace et al., 2009).”
Fears of compassion: development of three self-report measures. (2011, background): “Pace et al. (2008) found that compassion-focused meditations reduced stress-linked immune and behavioural responses.”
Inflammation in Fear- and Anxiety-Based Disorders: PTSD, GAD, and Beyond (2017, background): “…interventions that have been used for the treatment of fear- and anxiety-based disorder, such as community-based educational intervention, exercise, yoga, and mediation, have also been associated with decreases in inflammation (Bower and Irwin, 2016; Pace et al, 2009; Villablanca et al, 2015).”
Enhancing Compassion: A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Compassion Cultivation Training Program (2013, background): “There were no significant changes in the strength of association for any of the baseline correlations from pre-to post-CCT (all ps [ .11) and from pre-to-post WL (all ps [ .16) (Table 3).”
A Meta-Analysis of Compassion-Based Interventions: Current State of Knowledge and Future Directions. (2017, neutral): “…on the cultivation of compassion (Kirby, 2016): Compas-sion Focused Therapy (CFT; Gilbert, 2014), Mind-ful Self-Compassion (MSC; Neff & Germer, 2013 Pace et al., 2009), Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB; Kemeny et al., 2012), and Loving-Kindness (LKM) and Compassion Meditations (CM; e.g.,…”