Does practicing meditation improve how we understand others?
People who practice meditation show greater empathy, better emotion recognition, and less hostile social biases than those who do not.
Source
Exploring the Role of Meditation and Dispositional Mindfulness on Social Cognition Domains: A Controlled Study
What they did
The researchers compared a group of 30 meditators to a control group of 30 non-meditators from the community. All participants completed standardized tests measuring their empathy, emotion recognition, perspective-taking, and social biases. The researchers then examined how these social skills related to overall dispositional mindfulness and its specific facets.
What they found
Meditators scored significantly higher than non-meditators on key social skills, showing better performance in empathy, emotion recognition, and the ability to infer others' intentions. They also displayed significantly lower hostile social biases, reporting less anger, blame, and aggressive reactions in ambiguous social scenarios. Among the mindfulness facets, non-reactivity was identified as the strongest predictor of positive social cognitive abilities.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because this study used a cross-sectional design that evaluated participants at the same time, it cannot prove that meditation directly causes better social cognition. It is possible that individuals with naturally high social cognition are simply more drawn to meditation initially. Additionally, the study did not track the specific types of meditation practices used, and some of the Spanish-translated assessment tools demonstrated low internal reliability.
Key terms
- Dispositional mindfulness
- An individual's natural, trait-like tendency to be aware and conscious of their present-moment experiences in daily life.
- Social cognition
- The mental processes involved in perceiving, interpreting, and responding to the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of other people.
- Theory of Mind
- The cognitive capacity to attribute mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, to oneself and others.
- Attributional style
- The characteristic way an individual explains the causes of social events, which can range from benign to hostile or suspicious biases.
- Non-reactivity
- The mindfulness skill of allowing thoughts and feelings to flow naturally without feeling compelled to act or react to them impulsively.
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Quiz yourself
How is social cognition defined in the context of this study?
Common questions
How did the researchers measure the participants' ability to read emotions?
They used the Eyes Test, which asks participants to look at 36 photographs of actors' eyes and select the correct word describing what that person is thinking or feeling.
Did the study control for differences in education between the groups?
Yes, because the meditator group had a higher average level of education, the researchers ran analyses controlling for this difference; they found that education only significantly impacted the emotion recognition results.
Does any amount of meditation practice guarantee improved empathy?
Not necessarily, as this study specifically selected meditators who had at least 1 year's meditation experience, meaning these benefits may take time to develop.
Which specific aspect of mindfulness was most important for social skills?
The statistical analysis revealed that 'non-reactivity'—the ability to experience emotions and thoughts without reacting to them—was the strongest predictor of high empathy and low hostile biases.
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