Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
February 19, 2015
Haakon G. Engen, Tania Singer
170 citations
Compassion-meditation and Reappraisal both effectively regulate emotional responses to others' suffering, but through different mechanisms. Compassion-meditation primarily increases positive affect and activates brain regions linked to affiliation and reward, such as the ventral striatum and medial orbitofrontal cortex, even before seeing distressing stimuli. Reappraisal mainly decreases negative affect. Compassion's regulatory mechanism involves the endogenous generation of positive affect independent of the stimulus, which may preserve emotional connectedness.
Mindfulness
August 18, 2016
Bethany E. Kok, Tania Singer
154 citations
Different meditation practices produce distinct short-term psychological changes. In a 9-month training program with 229 mid-life adults, body scan meditation most increased awareness of internal body sensations and decreased thinking about thoughts, loving-kindness meditation most increased warmth and positive thoughts about others, and observing-thought meditation most increased awareness of one's own thinking processes. All practices, including breathing meditation, improved mood, energy, and present-moment focus while reducing distraction. The findings suggest each meditation type has a unique psychological fingerprint, which can guide their use in specific intervention contexts and populations.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
December 22, 2022
Christopher Timmermann, Prisca R. Bauer, Olivia Gosseries et al.
145 citations
A neurophenomenological framework is proposed for studying non-ordinary states of consciousness (NSCs) such as hypnosis, meditation, and psychedelics. NSCs involve shifts in what appears to the experiencer or how it appears, enabling investigation of the plastic and dynamic nature of experience across mind, brain, body, and context. The approach highlights NSCs as catalysts of transformation in clinical practice by refining understanding of relationships between subjective experience and neural dynamics. Ethical implications for standard conceptions of health and pathology are outlined, along with the crucial role of experience-based know-how in NSC research and application.
Journal of affective disorders
June 1, 2024
Malvika Godara, Martin Hecht, Tania Singer
11 citations
Online mindfulness-based and partner-based socio-emotional interventions, both supported by weekly coaching, reduced depression and emotion regulation difficulties over 10 weeks compared to a waitlist control group. Trait anxiety decreased only after mindfulness training. Multidimensional resilience increased only after socio-emotional training, and stress recovery improved only after mindfulness training. Socio-emotional training reduced negative interpretation bias, and this reduction mediated decreases in depression and trait anxiety. Neither training reduced state anxiety or negative attention bias. The sample was subclinical and mostly female, limiting generalizability.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
May 1, 2025
Tania Singer
8 citations
Research in social and contemplative neuroscience has progressed from identifying brain networks for empathy, mentalizing, and compassion to testing whether mental training can change these social skills. Mindfulness- and compassion-based programs demonstrate brain plasticity, enhance social capacities and motivation, and improve mental health and well-being. To address rising mental health problems and loneliness worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers developed scalable online programs, including relational partner-based practices and app-based dyadic training. Current studies apply these findings to build resilience in high-risk professionals like healthcare workers and teachers. Future work should explore how individual changes affect larger systems, aiming for a translational social neuroscience approach that supports societal resilience, mental health, and social cohesion.
Journal of personalized medicine
May 4, 2024
Malvika Godara, Tania Singer
6 citations
Brief app-based mindfulness and socio-emotional dyadic interventions improved depression, anxiety, emotion regulation, and stress recovery only among people who had shown resilient stress-reactivity profiles during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those with vulnerable profiles—characterized by less plasticity in stress recovery—did not improve on any outcome. The findings come from 253 community adults who used a daily 12-minute app for 10 weeks with weekly coaching. The results suggest that low-dose digital mental interventions may benefit individuals with greater stress resiliency, while more vulnerable individuals may need more intensive or personalized approaches.
Journal of clinical medicine
June 3, 2024
Malvika Godara, Tania Singer
5 citations
Two brief online mental interventions—attention-focused mindfulness and socio-emotional partner-based practice—were compared over 10 weeks in 253 participants. Both interventions led to week-to-week reductions in rumination and increases in psychological flexibility. Only attention-based practice reduced worry over time, and only the partner-based practice increased affective control. Mediation analyses found no significant indirect effects, but exploratory moderation showed that reductions in depression and anxiety and increases in resilience were predicted by weekly increases in acceptance and affective control in the partner-based group, and by weekly reductions in rumination and worry in the mindfulness group. The findings suggest distinct active ingredients for each practice.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
November 13, 2020
Lara M.c. Puhlmann, Pascal Vrtička, Roman Linz et al.
preprint
Regular contemplative mental training may reduce long-term stress as indicated by endocrine markers, though the abstract does not specify the direction or magnitude of the effect. The study aimed to investigate how such training influences stress-related hormone levels.