Effects Of Mindfulness Training On Different Dimensions Of Empathy: Evidence From Behavior And Electroencephalogram Research

The term “mindfulness” refers to the process of paying attention to the present experience intentionally and non-judgementally.Mindfulness training has been reported to improve well-being and promote interpersonal relationships.However,it remains unclear whether the training can improve empathy or not.The current study tested whether mindfulness training could improve empathy,and then further explored how the improvement was achieved and its underlying neural mechanism.Questionnaire measurements were conducted in a sample of university students,including the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire(FFMQ)measuring mindfulness traits and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index(IRI)measuring empathy.It was found that several mindfulness traits from FFMQ were positively correlated with “Perspective Taking” and negatively correlated with “Personal Distress” related to empathy.We then set up two fourteen-day training schedule with We-chat applet.The mindfulness training includes both knowledge acquirement and attention training,whereas the na?ve training only includes mindfulness-related knowledge listening.Two groups of university students were trained using the above schedules and their traits with FFMQ and IRI were measured both before and after training.Resutls showed that both schedule succeeded in improving mindfulness traits,whereas only participants who did the real mindfulness training changed their empathic traits,with their “Perspective Taking” score impoved and “Personal Distress” decreased.The former one is thought to be closely related with emotion understanding,while the latter is involved in affective components of empathy.To futher investigate the underlying neural mechanisms of the mindfulness-training-induced empathy change,we trained another two groups of participants and after that,they were asked to perform a pain-judgement task while electroencephalograph(EEG)was recorded.In the pain-judgment task,they judged whether the hand/hands in picture presented on the screen were in pain.We also included another group of training-na?ve participants to do the same task as control group.The results showed that in each group,ERPs of painful pictures and neutral ones were significantly different.Importantly,the pain-neutral difference in late positive potential(LPP)were larger in mindfulness-training group than the na?ve control group,while no difference was found between the na?ve control group and the control group.This change of LPP difference was in parallel with the improved emotion understanding after mindfulness training.Meanwhile,the N2 complex including the N240 and N340 elicited by pain versus neutral pictures was negatively correlated with the “Personal Distress” score in the mindfulness-training group.These results imply that the participants had become more sensitive to the affective stimuli but less likely to be disturbed.The present work uncovers the cognitive and affective effects of mindfulness training and the corresponding neural activities as well,which is helpful for understanding the interpersonal effects of mindfulness training.