Journal of Experimental Psychology General
January 1, 2018
Daniel R. Berry, Athena H. Cairo, Robert J. Goodman et al.
176 citations
Mindfulness, whether naturally occurring or briefly instructed, increases helping behavior toward strangers who are being excluded by others. Four studies showed that people higher in dispositional mindfulness felt more empathic concern for an ostracized stranger and were more likely to help them. Brief mindfulness instructions, compared to active control instructions, also promoted prosocial responses. These effects were not explained by empathic anger, a desire to punish the perpetrator, or relaxation. Empathic concern consistently mediated the link between mindfulness and helping. Meta-analyses across the studies found stable, medium-sized effects of mindfulness instruction on prosocial emotions and behavior.
Journal of Experimental Psychology General
September 24, 2020
Brian Chin, Emily K. Lindsay, Carol M. Greco et al.
49 citations
An 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction intervention that included both monitoring and acceptance skills, and a modified version that focused on monitoring skills only, both improved momentary and trait attentional control compared with no treatment. Improvements in momentary attentional control partially accounted for gains in trait attentional control. Performance on a dichotic listening sustained-attention task did not improve. The results suggest that present-focused monitoring skills training is a key driver of mindfulness-related improvements in attentional control.
Journal of Experimental Psychology General
January 30, 2017
Yair Pinto, Annelinde R. E. Vandenbroucke, Marte Otten et al.
23 citations
Change blindness—the failure to notice unattended changes in a visual scene—has been taken as evidence that conscious perception requires spatial attention. However, change blindness tasks introduce visual interference that forces reliance on working memory, which has limited capacity. Before such interference, a larger-capacity store called fragile memory exists. Two experiments show that minimizing spatial attention nearly eliminates visual working memory but leaves fragile memory largely intact. Furthermore, minimally attended fragile memory responses produce accurate metacognition, indicating that conscious memory persists with limited spatial attention. These findings suggest that both visual consciousness and memory can be supported by only minimal attention.
Journal of Experimental Psychology General
February 22, 2024
Enrico Fucci, Oussama Abdoun, Constanza Baquedano et al.
5 citations
Compassion in Western psychology is described as being conditioned by cost-benefit appraisals, such as attributing responsibility for suffering, whereas Buddhist traditions maintain that compassion can become unconditioned and universal. This study tested whether expert Buddhist practitioners show compassion that is less influenced by moral judgments about the causes of suffering. Using self-report and behavioral data from both expert practitioners and trained novices, the researchers found that contextual information affected responsibility and blame attribution in both groups. However, experts reported higher willingness to help that was less influenced by context compared to novices.
Journal of Experimental Psychology General
April 30, 2026
Aixin Liu, Minran Chen, Song Zhao et al.
A late bilateral occipital positivity in the brain's electrical activity appears to be a potential marker of conscious perception, but its reliability depends on stimulus complexity. Using a no-report inattentional blindness paradigm across three experiments, high-level, real-life object drawings (car and bell) consistently evoked this late ERP component following conscious perception, whereas low-level geometric drawings (square) did so less reliably. The findings suggest that the neural dynamics of consciousness unfold as a multistage process, with early perceptual awareness followed by later, content-specific processing, and that stimulus complexity modulates the elicitation of this late-stage neural activity.