Intensive Meditation Training Seems to Enhance Compassion
By BPS Research Digest, March 7, 2016
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Psychological research into meditation has overwhelmingly focused on its cognitive consequences, considering the practice as a kind of training for attention and behaviour control, together with stress alleviation. But contemplation traditions make far wider claims for meditation, such as that it helps practitioners cultivate concern for the welfare of others. A new study in the journal Emotion supports this perspective, using a rigorous measure of emotional response to show signs of enhanced compassion following intensive, long-term meditation.
Erika Rosenberg at the University of California, Davis and her colleagues contrasted 30 experienced meditators who had recently completely a 3-month meditation retreat in the Buddhist tradition with a control group of participants who were matched for age, meditation experience and education, and who spent the same three-month period leading their lives as usual (they got to enjoy the retreat after the study was over).
