People who train in practices that increase body awareness show greater moment-to-moment alignment between their subjective emotional feelings and their heart period. Experienced Vipassana meditators, who attend to visceral sensations, had the highest coherence, followed by dancers, who attend to somatic sensations, with controls having the lowest coherence. The findings suggest that specialized training in body awareness enhances the coherence between subjective and physiological aspects of emotion.
An 8-week compassion meditation class led participants to write more optimistic letters to a convicted murderer compared to mindfulness meditation, an active control, or no class. This effect was partly explained by participants valuing positivity more. No significant differences were found for empathy, sympathy, or forgiveness expressed in the letters. The study suggests that compassion meditation may specifically boost optimism toward unrelatable targets.