The researchers, from the Universities of Emory and Arizona (USA), selected several participants with no previous experience in meditation. Half of them followed a training in the practice of a type of meditation called CBCT (Cognitively-Based Compassion Training) for 8 weeks, while the rest followed workshops and discussions on the benefits of physical exercise for health.
Before and after the training or workshops, all participants took a facial recognition test whiletheir brain activity was scanned. This test consisted of a series of black and white images that only showed the eyes of different people, and the participants had to interpret the emotions and thoughts on these faces.
The researchers observed that, after training, almost all of the volunteers who had practiced meditationimproved their test results by 4.6 percent, while those who had not followed the training obtained the same score as at the beginning of the experiment. In addition, people in the meditation group showed increased neural activity in areas of the brain related to empathy, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.
“These results raise the possibility that CBCT meditation improved participants’ empathic abilities by increasing activity in areas of the brain that determine our ability to recognize the emotional states of others,” explains Charles Raison, one of the authors. “The next step will be to evaluate the effects in groups of people who can benefit from a greater capacity for empathy, such as those with autism or severe depression.”
