Meditation-Induced Self-Boundary Flexibility and Prosociality: A MEG and Behavioral Measures Study.
Yoav Schweitzer, Fynn-mathis Trautwein, Yair Dor-Ziderman, Ohad Nave, Jonathan David, Stephen Fulder, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana
Brain sciences November 26, 2024 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.3390/brainsci14121181 via PubMed
Summary
Long-term meditators show enhanced low-level prosocial processes compared to controls, including better emotion recognition and reduced outgroup bias. The study involved 44 meditators and 53 controls, examining the relationship between meditation-induced self-boundary flexibility and prosocial traits. Findings indicate that a neural index of self-boundary flexibility correlates with recognizing negative emotions, suggesting it may reduce social threat perception. These results highlight how meditation can promote prosocial behavior by altering self-boundaries.
Study at a glance
| Sample size | 97 |
|---|---|
| Population | 44 long-term meditators and 53 control participants |
| Key finding | Meditators exhibit enhanced prosocial capacities, including improved emotion recognition and decreased outgroup bias. |
Abstract
In the last decade, empirical studies on the beneficial effects of meditation on prosocial capacities have accumulated, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Buddhist sources state that liberating oneself from a fixed view of the self by gaining access to its transitory and malleable nature leads to increased compassion and other prosocial traits. These, however, have not yet been empirically tested. The current study aims at filling this gap by first examining whether 44 long term meditators differ from 53 controls in prosocial capacities on different levels of the socio-cognitive hierarchy, and second by examining whether these are associated with meditation-induced 'selfless' states, operationalized here as the sense of boundary (SB) flexibility. We capitalize on our previous work on the neurophenomenology of mindfulness-induced SB dissolution, which yielded a neural index of SB-flexibility, solely for the meditators, and examine its correlations with a battery of validated behavioral prosociality tasks. Our findings reveal enhanced low-level prosocial processes in meditators, including enhanced emotion recognition and reduced outgroup bias. We show the stability of SB flexibility over a year, demonstrating consistent high beta deactivation. The neural index of SB flexibility negatively correlates with recognizing negative emotions, suggesting a link to reduced social threat perception. These results connect the neural correlates of SB flexibility to prosociality, supported by stable high beta deactivations. We expect the results to raise awareness regarding the prosocial potential of flexing one's self-boundaries through meditation.