Although the benefits of meditation for physical and psychological well-being are well-known, little is known about factors that contribute to the successful completion of a meditation program and establishment of a regular meditation practice. Beginning meditators are often frustrated by the difficulties that they have meditating. Self-compassion, or treating oneself kindly in the face of …
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Educating the Heart: Cultivating Compassionate Global Citizens
This Think Tank explores how Critical Pedagogy and Social and Emotional Learning can be synthesised through an Ethics rooted in Compassion. The intention is to develop innovative pedagogy for a ‘Global Education Curriculum’ for students aged 8-15. Traditionally, Global Education nurtures competencies in line with Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy. It is proposed that the nurturing …
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Conceptualizing Compassion: A Heuristic Model
The study of compassion is gaining increasing attention. Yet to date, there is little consensus on what compassion is, how it is to be cultivated, or whether compassion is the appropriate term to capture a range of complex motivations, capacities and behaviors deemed critical not only to our survival, but also to our collective evolution …
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The neural and behavioral correlates of a neurofeedback-based metta meditation training
A compassionate and prosocial attitude can be cultivated through loving-kindness (metta) meditation. The proposed study aims to elucidate how brain activity, prosocial behaviour and prosocial attitudes in novice meditators change with a brief loving-kindness meditation training. Furthermore, the benefits of using neurofeedback to learn metta meditation strategies will be investigated. Twenty female participants will receive …
Changing our perception of others through compassion meditation
In this study we will examine the neural and autonomic correlates of emotional face perception before and after Compassion meditation practice. Our long-term goal of this project is to contribute to an improved understanding of how stress-causing social perceptions can be changed through Compassion meditation (ComM). Our objective in this study is to determine if, …
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Mindfulness-based kindness curriculum for preschool children: A replication and extension
The purpose of this project is to evaluate the effects of a mindfulness-based prosocial skills training curriculum in preschool students with a larger sample in order to replicate and extend findings from initial pilot work conducted in previous years. Participants from the local public school 4-year old Kindergarten program were recruited and participated in pre …
Investigating the correlates and consequences of directed loving-kindness meditation
The need for social connection is a fundamental human motive, and it is increasingly clear that feeling socially connected confers mental and physical health benefits. However, in many cultures, societal changes are leading to growing social distrust and alienation. Can feelings of social connection and positivity toward others be increased? Is it possible to self-generate …
The FACE Study: Faces, Attention, Compassion, and Emotion
While the mien of meditation masters such as His Holiness the Dalai Lama is often remarked upon as a powerful component of the fruit of their practice, little is known scientifically about links between the practice of meditation and changes in facial expression and whether these changes would be linked to emotional and/or physiological variables. …
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Compassion meditation vs. cognitive reappraisal as emotion regulation strategies to negative stimuli: An fMRI investigation
Previous emotion regulation studies (Ochsner et al., 2004, Urry et al., 2006) have used reappraisal as a strategy to investigate neural mechanisms of down-regulating negative emotion. Compassion may also be viewed as a regulatory strategy to cope with negative emotion, which may differ in neural mechanism and positive behavioral outcomes. In a pilot study, we investigate …
Trust and Christian contemplative practice: A social neuroscientific study of spiritual capital in a contemplative tradition
Growing recognition of the benefits of contemplative practice for the reduction of harmful stress and the improvement of prosocial behavior is prompting research into how these effects arise. We define contemplative practice as intentionally attempting to suspend all discursive and evaluative thought. In practice, most forms of contemplative practice emphasize compassion for self and others, …
