Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
February 19, 2015
Haakon Engen, Tania Singer
170 citations
Compassion-meditation and Reappraisal both effectively regulate emotional responses to others' suffering, but through different mechanisms. Compassion-meditation primarily increases positive affect and activates brain regions linked to affiliation and reward, such as the ventral striatum and medial orbitofrontal cortex, even before seeing distressing stimuli. Reappraisal mainly decreases negative affect. Compassion's regulatory mechanism involves the endogenous generation of positive affect independent of the stimulus, which may preserve emotional connectedness.
Mindfulness
August 18, 2016
Bethany E Kok, Tania Singer
154 citations
Different meditation practices produce distinct short-term psychological changes. In a 9-month training program with 229 mid-life adults, body scan meditation most increased awareness of internal body sensations and decreased thinking about thoughts, loving-kindness meditation most increased warmth and positive thoughts about others, and observing-thought meditation most increased awareness of one's own thinking processes. All practices, including breathing meditation, improved mood, energy, and present-moment focus while reducing distraction. The findings suggest each meditation type has a unique psychological fingerprint, which can guide their use in specific intervention contexts and populations.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
December 22, 2022
Christopher Timmermann, Prisca R. Bauer, Olivia Gosseries et al.
145 citations
A neurophenomenological framework is proposed for studying non-ordinary states of consciousness (NSCs) such as hypnosis, meditation, and psychedelics. NSCs involve shifts in what appears to the experiencer or how it appears, enabling investigation of the plastic and dynamic nature of experience across mind, brain, body, and context. The approach highlights NSCs as catalysts of transformation in clinical practice by refining understanding of relationships between subjective experience and neural dynamics. Ethical implications for standard conceptions of health and pathology are outlined, along with the crucial role of experience-based know-how in NSC research and application.
Journal of Affective Disorders
June 1, 2024
Malvika Godara, Martin Hecht, Tania Singer
11 citations
Online mindfulness-based and partner-based socio-emotional interventions, both supported by weekly coaching, reduced depression and emotion regulation difficulties over 10 weeks compared to a waitlist control group. Trait anxiety decreased only after mindfulness training. Multidimensional resilience increased only after socio-emotional training, and stress recovery improved only after mindfulness training. Socio-emotional training reduced negative interpretation bias, and this reduction mediated decreases in depression and trait anxiety. Neither training reduced state anxiety or negative attention bias. The sample was subclinical and mostly female, limiting generalizability.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
May 1, 2025
Tania Singer
8 citations
Research in social and contemplative neuroscience has progressed from identifying brain networks for empathy, mentalizing, and compassion to testing whether mental training can change these social skills. Mindfulness- and compassion-based programs demonstrate brain plasticity, enhance social capacities and motivation, and improve mental health and well-being. To address rising mental health problems and loneliness worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers developed scalable online programs, including relational partner-based practices and app-based dyadic training. Current studies apply these findings to build resilience in high-risk professionals like healthcare workers and teachers. Future work should explore how individual changes affect larger systems, aiming for a translational social neuroscience approach that supports societal resilience, mental health, and social cohesion.
Journal of Personalized Medicine
May 4, 2024
Malvika Godara, Tania Singer
6 citations
Brief app-based mindfulness and socio-emotional dyadic interventions improved depression, anxiety, emotion regulation, and stress recovery only among people who had shown resilient stress-reactivity profiles during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those with vulnerable profiles—characterized by less plasticity in stress recovery—did not improve on any outcome. The findings come from 253 community adults who used a daily 12-minute app for 10 weeks with weekly coaching. The results suggest that low-dose digital mental interventions may benefit individuals with greater stress resiliency, while more vulnerable individuals may need more intensive or personalized approaches.
Journal of Clinical Medicine
June 3, 2024
Malvika Godara, Tania Singer
5 citations
Two brief online mental interventions—attention-focused mindfulness and socio-emotional partner-based practice—were compared over 10 weeks in 253 participants. Both interventions led to week-to-week reductions in rumination and increases in psychological flexibility. Only attention-based practice reduced worry over time, and only the partner-based practice increased affective control. Mediation analyses found no significant indirect effects, but exploratory moderation showed that reductions in depression and anxiety and increases in resilience were predicted by weekly increases in acceptance and affective control in the partner-based group, and by weekly reductions in rumination and worry in the mindfulness group. The findings suggest distinct active ingredients for each practice.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
November 13, 2020
Lara M.c. Puhlmann, Pascal Vrtička, Roman Linz et al.
preprint
Regular contemplative mental training may reduce long-term stress as indicated by endocrine markers, though the abstract does not specify the direction or magnitude of the effect. The study aimed to investigate how such training influences stress-related hormone levels.
Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science
March 1, 2025
Lara M.c. Puhlmann, Pascal Vrtička, Roman Linz et al.
A randomized clinical trial with 332 healthy adults tested whether mindfulness- and meditation-based mental training can increase brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein that supports hippocampal neuroplasticity, and whether cortisol reduction mediates this effect. Participants were assigned to one of three training cohorts (attention-based mindfulness, socio-affective skills, or socio-cognitive skills) or a passive control group. Training cohorts completed up to three 3-month modules. Combined training groups showed significant cumulative increases in serum BDNF after 3, 6, and 9 months relative to baseline (estimated increases: 1353, 1557, and 2276 pg/mL, respectively).
Scientific Reports
August 24, 2023
Paul Petzold, Sarita Silveira, Malvika Godara et al.
Two daily app-based practices—a 12-minute partner-based socio-emotional exercise (Affect Dyad) and a 12-minute solitary mindfulness practice—were compared over 10 weeks in 212 adults aged 18–65. Both practices increased positive affect and arousal. The mindfulness practice reduced active thoughts, especially those about the future, others, and negative topics. The Dyad, in contrast, increased thoughts about others and positive thoughts, which may help counter ruminative thinking patterns tied to self-focused and negative content. These differential effects could guide the adaptation of scalable app-based mental training for different populations.
Psychoneuroendocrinology
July 1, 2022
Katja Hoehne, Pascal Vrtička, Veronika Engert et al.
Oxytocin is released acutely in response to psychosocial stress, but a single session of Loving-kindness Meditation did not trigger acute oxytocin release. In a 9-month longitudinal study with 313 participants, three months of compassion-based mental training (Affect Module) reduced overall oxytocin levels during stress but increased overall oxytocin levels during Loving-kindness Meditation, compared to no training. These training-induced changes in overall oxytocin were unrelated to cortisol or subjective stress reactivity. The authors interpret the findings as alterations in the anticipated emotional relevance of events, suggesting oxytocin's role is allostatic rather than directly mediating stress reduction.
Neuroimage
August 15, 2021
Pauline Favre, Philipp Kanske, Haakon Engen et al.
A three-month mental training module focused on socio-affective skills like compassion (the Affect module) reduced negative feelings when viewing images of human suffering and increased brain activity in the right supramarginal gyrus. Two other three-month modules—one cultivating attention and interoceptive awareness (Presence) and another cultivating socio-cognitive skills like theory of mind (Perspective)—did not produce these effects. The findings suggest that compassion-based mental training specifically improves emotion regulation when facing adversity, whereas attention- or meta-cognitive training does not.
Current Opinion in Psychology
August 1, 2019
Tania Singer, Veronika Engert
A 9-month longitudinal mental training study compared three practice types: present-moment attention and interoception, socio-emotional processes (compassion and loving kindness), and meta-cognitive processes with perspective-taking. Each practice type produced distinct effects across phenomenological experience, structural brain changes, social cognition, altruism, and physiological stress responses (including cortisol). The findings argue for a more differentiated view of mindfulness and meditation, showing that different mental practices yield specific rather than uniform benefits.
Consciousness and Cognition
July 1, 2018
Marisa Przyrembel, Tania Singer
Micro-phenomenological interviews reveal distinct affective, bodily, and sensorial signatures for three meditation practices. Breathing meditation transcripts contain the most body-related vocabulary, especially sensations in the nose and abdomen. Observing-thought meditation transcripts contain the most cognition-related vocabulary and are experienced in the head and face. Loving-kindness meditation transcripts contain the most vocabulary related to socio-affective processes and are associated with love, sensations around the heart, and warmth. These findings were replicated with an independent set of interviews, supporting micro-phenomenological interviews as a reliable tool for gathering first-person data beyond questionnaires or rating scales.
Brain and Behavior
April 1, 2018
Anna-Lena Lumma, Sofie L. Valk, Anne Böckler et al.
Training that improves perspective-taking can change how people describe themselves emotionally, and those changes are linked to structural brain changes. In a large longitudinal study, participants who increased their use of emotional words in self-descriptions after socio-cognitive training showed thickening in the right medial prefrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, regions involved in self-referential thinking and cognitive control. Increased use of negative emotional words was associated with thickening in the left pars orbitalis and bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results suggest that restructuring the emotional self-concept, including reappraisal of negative aspects, relates to cortical plasticity, which could inform psychological interventions targeting the self-concept.
Mindfulness
December 1, 2017
Lea K. Hildebrandt, Cade McCall, Tania Singer
A 9-month longitudinal study (the ReSource Project) compared three 3-month mental training modules. The attention-focused "Presence" module increased observing, nonreacting, and presence but not acceptance or nonjudging. The socio-cognitive "Perspective" module improved acceptance, and the socio-affective "Affect" module improved nonjudging and compassion. Only the Affect module uniquely raised compassion and self-compassion scores. Thus, present-moment attention training alone is insufficient to cultivate ethical-motivational qualities; explicit socio-cognitive and compassion-based practices are needed for broad changes in nonjudgmental attitude, compassion, and self-compassion.
Psychophysiology
March 1, 2017
Boris Bornemann, Tania Singer
Heartbeat perception accuracy, a measure of interoceptive ability linked to physical and psychological health and emotional awareness, can be improved through intensive contemplative mental training. In a 9-month study with three training modules targeting attention, socio-affective, and socio-cognitive skills, participants showed small but significant increases in heartbeat perception accuracy after 6 and 9 months of practice. These improvements were associated with and predicted increases in emotional awareness. The findings indicate that meaningful changes in interoceptive accuracy require longer practice than typical 8-week mindfulness courses, and such training may offer pathways to enhance health.
JAMA Psychiatry
February 1, 2017
Bethany E Kok, Tania Singer
Contemplative practices performed in pairs (dyads) increased social connectedness as much as or more than solitary meditation, and participants engaged with them similarly. In a 9-month trial, 226 healthy adults in Germany completed three 3-month modules: presence (breathing meditation and body scan), affect (loving-kindness meditation and affect dyad), and perspective (observing-thoughts meditation and perspective dyad). Compliance was similar across all practices, though motivation was higher for solitary meditation than for dyads. Social closeness increased during and over time for both dyads, with the affect dyad showing steeper increases in self-disclosure. Contemplative dyads offer a new way to target social connectedness, which is often deficient in loneliness and psychopathologies.
International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology
July 1, 2015
Anna-Lena Lumma, Bethany E Kok, Tania Singer
Meditation is not always relaxing; some types require mental effort and increase physiological arousal. In a year-long training study, three meditation types—breathing, loving-kindness, and observing-thoughts—were practiced daily for three months each. Loving-kindness and observing-thoughts meditation produced higher heart rate and greater perceived effort than breathing meditation. Over time, heart rate and likeability increased while heart rate variability and effort decreased. The increases in heart rate and decreases in heart rate variability were larger for loving-kindness and observing-thoughts meditation. These findings suggest that meditations aimed at compassion and meta-cognitive skills involve effort and arousal, which may help tailor meditation recommendations to specific contexts.