Mindfulness meditation regulates anterior insula activity during empathy for social pain.
Open accessAbstract
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 while manipulating the meditation state between two groups of LTM practitioners that were matched with a control group. The results show increased activations of the anterior insula (AI) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) as well as the medial prefrontal cortex and temporal pole when sharing others' social suffering, both in LTM practitioners and controls. However, in LTM practitioners, who practiced mindfulness meditation just prior to observing others' social pain, left AI activation was lower and the strength of AI activation following the mindfulness meditation was negatively associated with trait compassion in LTM practitioners. The findings suggest that current mindfulness meditation could provide an adaptive mechanism in coping with distress due to the empathic sharing of others' suffering, thereby possibly enabling compassionate behavior. Hum Brain Mapp 38:4034-4046, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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Functional change in insula is induced by MBSR, MBSR tasks, and dispositional mindfulness.
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From Enhanced Resting-State Functional Connectivity With Decreased Amplitude of Low-Frequency Fluctuations of the Salience Network in Mindfulness Novices (2022) · cites this paper as Laneri et al., 2017
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- Authors
- Laneri, D., Krach, S., Paulus, F. M., Kanske, P., Schuster, V., Sommer, J., & Müller‐Pinzler, L.
- Affiliations
- Philipps University of Marburg (DE)
- Social Neuroscience Lab (DE)
- Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (DE)
- Venue
- Human Brain Mapping
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2017-05-15
- Volume
- 38
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 4034-4046
- ISSN
- 1065-9471 (ISSN-L)
- 1097-0193
- PMC
- PMC6867068
- OpenAlex
- W2613207699
- Cited by
- 61
- References
- 80
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 8 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 2
- FWCI
- 6.77
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Human Brain Mapping (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- German Research Foundation (KR3803/7-1)
- von Behring-Röntgen-Stiftung (KR 60-0023)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Mindfulness and Compassion Interventions
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Action Observation and Synchronization
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Empathy and Medical Education
- Keywords
- mindfulness meditation, anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, temporal pole, compassion, neural correlates of empathy, prosocial behavior, emotional distress
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Brain Mapping, Cerebral Cortex, Empathy, Female, Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Middle Aged, Neuropsychological Tests, Practice, Psychological, Social Perception, Meditation, Pain Perception, Mindfulness
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