Cultivating concern for others: Meditation training and motivated engagement with human suffering.

Contemplative traditions have long affirmed that compassion and kindness are trainable skills. While research on meditation practice has recently flourished, the mechanisms that might engender such changes are still poorly understood. Here, we present a motivational framework to explain why meditation training should increase concern for others and modulate empathic engagement with human suffering over time. Meditation practices are conceived as tools for enacting cognitive and emotion regulatory goals that are conditioned by the underlying ethical motivation of the training-to reduce and alleviate suffering. In support of this account, we present data from a randomized, wait-list-controlled study of intensive meditation. In Study 1, we use a novel cardiovascular index to show that 3 months of meditation training can increase the motivational salience of others' suffering, as compared to the salience of threats to oneself. In Study 2, we demonstrate that training-related changes in the ability to orient attention to suffering are mediated by the dynamic regulation of distress-related physiological arousal. Finally, in Study 3, we provide exploratory evidence suggesting that meditation training may influence how human suffering is encoded in memory, leaving lasting imprints on the recollection of emotional experience. Together, our findings suggest that meditation training can strengthen the motivational relevance of others' suffering, prompting a shift from self-focused to other-focused evaluative processing. Considering meditation training from a motivational standpoint offers an important perspective for understanding how compassion can be cultivated through intentional practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Shifting Baselines: Longitudinal Reductions in EEG Beta Band Power Characterize Resting Brain Activity with Intensive Meditation.

Objectives: A core assumption of meditation training is that cognitive capacities developed during formal practice will transfer to other contexts or activities as expertise develops over time. This implies that meditation training might influence domain-general neurocognitive systems, the spontaneous activity of which should be reflected in the dynamics of the resting brain. Previous research has demonstrated that 3 months of meditation training led to reductions in EEG beta band power during mindfulness of breathing practice. The current study extends these findings to ask whether concomitant shifts in power are observed during 2 min of eyes closed rest, when participants are not explicitly engaged in formal meditation. Methods: Experienced meditation practitioners were randomly assigned to practice 3 months of focused attention meditation in a residential retreat, or to serve as waitlist controls. The waitlist controls later completed their own 3-month retreat. Permutation-based cluster analysis of 88-channel resting EEG data was used to test for spectral changes in spontaneous brain activity over the course of the retreats. Results: Longitudinal reductions in EEG power in the beta frequency range were identified and replicated across the two independent training periods. Less robust reductions were also observed in the high alpha frequency range, and in individual peak alpha frequency. These changes closely mirror those previously observed during formal mindfulness of breathing meditation practice. Conclusions: These findings suggest that the neurocognitive effects of meditation training can extend beyond the bounds of formal practice, influencing the spontaneous activity of the resting brain. Rather than serving as an invariant baseline, resting states might carry meaningful training-related effects, blurring the line between state and trait change. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12671-022-01974-9.

Meditation training modulates brain electric microstates and felt states of awareness.

Meditation practice is believed to foster states of mindful awareness and mental quiescence in everyday life. If so, then the cultivation of these qualities with training ought to leave its imprint on the activity of intrinsic functional brain networks. In an intensive longitudinal study, we investigated associations between meditation practitioners' experiences of felt mindful awareness and changes in the spontaneous electrophysiological dynamics of functional brain networks. Experienced meditators were randomly assigned to complete 3 months of full-time training in focused-attention meditation (during an initial intervention) or to serve as waiting-list controls and receive training second (during a later intervention). We collected broadband electroencephalogram (EEG) during rest at the beginning, middle, and end of the two training periods. Using a data-driven approach, we segmented the EEG into a time series of transient microstate intervals based on clustering of topographic voltage patterns. Participants also provided daily reports of felt mindful awareness and mental quiescence, and reported daily on four experiential qualities of their meditation practice during training. We found that meditation training led to increases in mindful qualities of awareness, which corroborate contemplative accounts of deepening mental calm and attentional focus. We also observed reductions in the strength and duration of EEG microstates across both interventions. Importantly, changes in the dynamic sequencing of microstates were associated with daily increases in felt attentiveness and serenity during training. Our results connect shifts in subjective qualities of meditative experience with the large-scale dynamics of whole brain functional EEG networks at rest.

Deconstructing the effects of concentration meditation practice on interference control: The roles of controlled attention and inflammatory activity.

Prior work has linked meditation practice to improvements in interference control. However, the mechanisms underlying these improvements are relatively unknown. In the context of meditation training, improvements in interference control could result eitherfrom increases in controlled attention to goal-relevant stimuli, or from reductions in automatic capture by goal-irrelevant stimuli. Moreover, few studies have linked training-related changes in attention to physiological processes, such as inflammatory activity, that are thought to influence cognitive function. This study addresses these gaps by examining associations between cognitive performance and cytokines in the context of an intensive meditation retreat. Participants were randomly assigned to complete 3 months of meditation training first, or to serve as waitlist controls. The waitlist-control participants then later completed a separate 3-month training intervention. We assessed participants' interference control with a flanker task and used computational modeling to derive component processes of controlled and automatic attention. We also collected blood samples at the beginning, middle, and end of training to quantify changes in cytokine activity. Participants who completed training evidenced better controlled attention than waitlist controls during the first retreat intervention, and controls showed significant improvements in controlled attention when they completed their own, second retreat. Importantly, inflammatory activity was inversely associated with controlled attention during both interventions. Our results suggest that practice of concentration meditation influences interference control by enhancing controlled attention to goal-relevant task elements, and that inflammatory activity relates to individual differences in controlled attention.

Within and between-person correlates of the temporal dynamics of resting EEG microstates.

Microstates reflect transient brain states resulting from the synchronous activity of brain networks that predominate in the broadband EEG. There has been increasing interest in how the functional organization of the brain varies across individuals, or the extent to which its spatiotemporal dynamics are state dependent. However, little research has examined within and between-person correlates of microstate temporal parameters in healthy populations. In the present study, neuroelectric activity recorded during eyes-closed rest and during simple visual fixation was segmented into a time series of transient microstate intervals. It was found that five data-driven microstate configurations explained the preponderance of topographic variance in the EEG time series of the 374 recordings (from 187 participants) included in the study. We observed that the temporal dynamics of microstates varied within individuals to a greater degree than they differed between persons, with within-person factors explaining a large portion of the variance in mean microstate duration and occurrence rate. Nevertheless, several individual differences were found to predict the temporal dynamics of microstates. Of these, age and gender were the most reliable. These findings not only suggest that the rich temporal dynamics of whole-brain neuronal networks vary considerably within individuals, but that microstates appear to differentiate persons based on trait individual differences. Rather than focusing exclusively on between-person differences in microstates as measures of brain function, researchers should turn their attention towards understanding the factors contributing to within-person variation.

Dissecting "Peer Presence" and "Decisions" to Deepen Understanding of Peer Influence on Adolescent Risky Choice.

This study evaluated the aspects of complex decisions influenced by peers, and components of peer involvement influential to adolescents' risky decisions. Participants (N = 140) aged 13-25 completed the Columbia Card Task (CCT), a risky choice task, isolating deliberation-reliant and affect-reliant decisions while alone, while a friend monitors choices, and while a friend is merely present. There is no condition in which a nonfriend peer is present. Results demonstrated the risk-increasing peer effect occurred in the youngest participants in the cold CCT and middle-late adolescents in the hot CCT, whereas other ages and contexts showed a risk-decreasing peer effect. Mere presence was not sufficient to influence risky behavior. These boundaries in age, decision, and peer involvement constrain prevailing models of adolescent peer influence.