Religions
August 12, 2025
Anne Böckler
Psychology as an empirical science has targeted human cognition for more than a century. Typically, the focus of these investigations was on isolated mental processes, which were studied in individual participants in confined laboratory settings. The present commentary aims to show how a relatively recent paradigm shift, the (renewed) conception of humans as fundamentally social, can shape our...
Elife
July 7, 2023
Sofie Louise Valk, Philipp Kanske, Bo-Yong Park et al.
The human brain supports social cognitive functions, including Theory of Mind, empathy, and compassion, through its intrinsic hierarchical organization. However, it remains unclear how the learning and refinement of social skills shapes brain function and structure. We studied if different types of social mental training induce changes in cortical function and microstructure, investigating 332...
Journal of Experimental Psychology General
July 2022
Anne Böckler, Tania Singer
Recent decades have witnessed an increasing interest in effects of meditation-based interventions on the improvement of cognitive abilities, ranging from perceptual discrimination to metacognition. However, intervention studies face numerous conceptual and methodological challenges, and results are fairly inconsistent. In a large-scale 9-month mental training study, we investigated differential...
Cognition
August 23, 2019
Fynn-Mathis Trautwein, Philipp Kanske, Anne Böckler et al.
Mindfulness- and, more generally, meditation-based interventions increasingly gain popularity, effectively promoting cognitive, affective, and social capacities. It is unclear, however, if different types of practice have the same or specific effects on mental functioning. Here we tested three consecutive three-month training modules aimed at cultivating either attention, socio-affective...
Brain and Behavior
April 1, 2018
Anna-Lena Lumma, Sofie L. Valk, Anne Böckler et al.
Self-referential processing is a key component of the emotional self-concept. Previous studies have shown that emotional self-referential processing is related to structure and function of cortical midline areas such as medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and that it can be altered on a behavioral level by specific mental training practices. However, it remains unknown how behavioral...
Science Advances
October 4, 2017
Sofie L. Valk, Boris C. Bernhardt, Fynn-Mathis Trautwein et al.
Although neuroscientific research has revealed experience-dependent brain changes across the life span in sensory, motor, and cognitive domains, plasticity relating to social capacities remains largely unknown. To investigate whether the targeted mental training of different cognitive and social skills can induce specific changes in brain morphology, we collected longitudinal magnetic resonance...
Journal of Cognitive Enhancement
May 16, 2017
Anne Böckler, Lukas Herrmann, Fynn-Mathis Trautwein et al.
Understanding others' feelings, intentions, and beliefs is a crucial social skill both for our personal lives and for meeting the challenges of a globalized world. Recent evidence suggests that the ability to represent and infer others' mental states (Theory of Mind, ToM) can be enhanced by mental training in healthy adults. The present study investigated the role of training-induced...