Mindfulness and Compassion: An Examination of Mechanism and Scalability
PLoS ONE February 17, 2015 Daniel Lim, Paul Condon, David Desteno 297 citations
After three weeks of mobile-app based mindfulness meditation training, people were more likely to give up their seat to a person on crutches displaying discomfort than those who completed cognitive skills training. Empathic accuracy—the ability to read others' emotions—did not improve with mindfulness practice, indicating that mindfulness-enhanced compassionate behavior does not rely on better emotional decoding. The experiment used an ecologically valid situation in a public waiting area to measure real compassionate responding.