Effects of compassion training on brain responses to suffering others.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience September 30, 2021 Yoni K Ashar, Jessica R Andrews-Hanna, Joan Halifax et al.
A four-week compassion meditation program delivered via smartphone increased brain activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) when participants listened to stories of suffering others, compared with a condition that controlled for increased familiarity with suffering. Among compassion meditation participants, greater increases in mOFC activity correlated with greater self-reported compassion-related feelings and attributions. Compared with a placebo condition (presented as oxytocin), the meditation group showed a similar mOFC increase at an uncorrected statistical threshold. The authors conclude that the mOFC is an important brain mechanism of compassion meditation, that its effects are not explained by familiarity, and that they are partly explained by placebo effects.