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 …
Continue reading “Conceptualizing Compassion: A Heuristic Model”
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 …
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, …
Continue reading “Changing our perception of others through compassion meditation”
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 …
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 …
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. …
Continue reading “The FACE Study: Faces, Attention, Compassion, and Emotion”
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 …
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, …
Daily teachers are confronted with challenging child behaviors that provoke their emotional reactivity and result in stress that may affect the classroom climate and the pupils’ learning (Emmer, 1994; Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). Although teachers’ emotionally-related behavior may have powerful effects on the social and emotional development of their pupils (Hamre & Pianta, 2001), few …
Continue reading “Cultivating Emotional Balance Classroom Project”
The concept of Botho/Ubuntu encapsulates the fundamental values, belief systems, cosmological worldviews and livelihood practices of indigenous Africans generally and Batswana in particular. Botho/Ubuntu is manifested in the Botswana internal and external environment, and it guides the manner in which communities interact with one another and with their external environment. Tswana idioms and proverbs, and …
