Mindfulness meditation regulates anterior insula activity during empathy for social pain.

ABSTRACT: Mindfulness has been shown to reduce stress, promote health, and well-being, as well as to increase compassionate behavior toward others. It reduces distress to one's own painful experiences, going along with altered neural responses, by enhancing self-regulatory processes and decreasing emotional reactivity. In order to investigate if mindfulness similarly reduces distress and neural activations associated with empathy for others' socially painful experiences, which might in the following more strongly motivate prosocial behavior, the present study compared trait, and state effects of long-term mindfulness meditation (LTM) practice. To do so we acquired behavioral data and neural activity measures using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during an empathy for social pain task wh

SUBMITTER: Laneri D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6867068 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature