Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training.

By Olga M. Klimecki, Susanne Leiberg, M. Ricard, Tania Singer. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2014

609 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although empathy is crucial for successful social interactions, excessive sharing of others' negative emotions may be maladaptive and constitute a source of burnout. To investigate functional neural plasticity underlying the augmentation of empathy and to test the counteracting potential of compassion, one group of participants was first trained in empathic resonance and subsequently in compassion. In response to videos depicting human suffering, empathy training, but not memory training (control group), increased negative affect and brain activations in anterior insula and anterior midcingulate cortex-brain regions previously associated with empathy for pain. In contrast, subsequent compassion training could reverse the increase in negative effect and, in contrast, augment self-reports of positive affect. In addition, compassion training increased activations in a non-overlapping brain network spanning ventral striatum, pregenual anterior cingulate cortex and medial orbitofrontal cortex. We conclude that training compassion may reflect a new coping strategy to overcome empathic distress and strengthen resilience.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Psychiatry and Mental health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/10027eff4f23a6eb9f0b6b76c8afbbd90f8d9fc7

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Citations in the corpus

A Meta-Analysis of Compassion-Based Interventions: Current State of Knowledge and Future Directions. (2017, positive): “…health, including influencing genetic expression in cross-sectional studies (e.g., Fredrickson et al., 2013), as well as in intervention studies (Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard, & Singer, 2014), positive correlations found for mental health and emotion regulation (e.g., MacBeth & Gumley, 2012), as…”
Empathy: a motivated account. (2014, background): “A third strategy that has gained recent popularity adapts Buddhist practices of compassion meditation to increase subjective empathy, neural resonance, and prosociality (Klimecki et al., 2014; Leiberg, Klimecki, & Singer, 2011; Weng et al., 2013).”
On the interaction of social affect and cognition: empathy, compassion and theory of mind (2018, positive): “Empathy and compassion also differ on a neural level: compassion activates networks that have previously been associated with reward and affiliation processes including the ventral striatum (VS), the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental area (VTA), the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and the ”
Reconstructing and deconstructing the self: cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice. (2015, background): “To date, constructive meditation practices have received less attention than other forms of meditation in scientific research, though a few studies have begun to explore practices related to this family, including the cultivation of compassion [69,70] and imagination-based meditations [15].”
The development of compassionate engagement and action scales for self and others (2017, background): “…wealth of research showing e that developing caring and compassion-focused motives for self and others has a range of benefits: on genetic expression [14, 31, 109], physiological processes [9, 68, 71, 73, 107, 108], psychological processes [63, 64, 66, 108], and social relationships [16, 18, 100].”
The Role of Empathy and Compassion in Conflict Resolution (2019, background): “Previous studies have shown that training in loving kindness or compassion promotes positive emotions in everyday life (Fredrickson et al., 2008) and in response to suffering (Klimecki et al., 2013; Klimecki et al., 2014).”
Dissecting the social brain: Introducing the EmpaToM to reveal distinct neural networks and brain-behavior relations for empathy and Theory of Mind (2015, positive): “Importantly, both the behavioral and neural markers of empathy were validated with an external established empathy task, the SovT (Klimecki et al., 2014).”