Compassion meditation enhances empathic accuracy and related neural activity

Abstract

The ability to accurately infer others' mental states from facial expressions is important for optimal social functioning and is fundamentally impaired in social cognitive disorders such as autism. While pharmacologic interventions have shown promise for enhancing empathic accuracy, little is known about the effects of behavioral interventions on empathic accuracy and related brain activity. This study employed a randomized, controlled and longitudinal design to investigate the effect of a secularized analytical compassion meditation program, cognitive-based compassion training (CBCT), on empathic accuracy. Twenty-one healthy participants received functional MRI scans while completing an empathic accuracy task, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), both prior to and after completion of either CBCT or a health discussion control group. Upon completion of the study interventions, participants randomized to CBCT and were significantly more likely than control subjects to have increased scores on the RMET and increased neural activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). Moreover, changes in dmPFC and IFG activity from baseline to the post-intervention assessment were associated with changes in empathic accuracy. These findings suggest that CBCT may hold promise as a behavioral intervention for enhancing empathic accuracy and the neurobiology supporting it.

Fig. 1

Schematic of entire study design. FMRI assessments are the focus of the current study.

Fig. 2

Activation map (emotion–gender) was thresholded at P < 0.001. Location of functional ROIs in left IFG and posterior STS indicated by arrow.

Fig. 3

Repeated measures of empathic accuracy scores broken up according to group. At Time 2, the meditation group scored significantly higher than the control group [t(19) = 2.31, P = 0.03].

Fig. 4

Correlation of standardized residual change in RMET scores with standardized residual change in brain activity in the left IFG [r(19) = 0.55, P = 0.01], left posterior STS (left post STS) [r(19) = 0.59, P = 0.01] and dmPFC [r(19) = 0.56, P = 0.01].