Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM), a contemplative practice that aims to promote social well-being, has also been linked to lower self-reported pain symptoms. However, it remains unknown whether LKM can reduce pain through having a positive impact on social well-being, as well as whether LKM can improve self-reported acute pain and objectively measured acute pain tolerance among a general,...
Loneliness, which has reached an all-time high in the United States, has been linked to reduced self-reported empathy. Loving kindness meditation (LKM) is aimed at extending love and kindness to others and has been shown to increase empathy. But whether LKM can reduce loneliness, and whether this corresponds to higher levels of trait empathy, state empathy, and/or neural empathic responding,...
Abstract Most people are much less generous toward strangers than close others, a bias termed social discounting. But people who engage in extraordinary real-world altruism, like altruistic kidney donors, show dramatically reduced social discounting. Why they do so is unclear. Some prior research suggests reduced social discounting requires effortfully overcoming selfishness via recruitment of...