Social cognition
Does practicing meditation improve how we understand others?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People who practice meditation show greater empathy, better emotion recognition, and less hostile social biases than those who do not.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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Theory of Mind and related social cognition capacities can be trained and enhanced through specific practices such as mindfulness meditation and targeted cognitive perspective-taking training.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Practicing meditation is linked to superior performance in empathy, emotion recognition, and perspective-taking, as well as lower levels of hostile social biases.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Case-control — Masters-in-mindfulness meditators vs community non-meditators on social-cognition and dispositional mindfulness
- N
- N=60 · 30 meditators and 30 non-meditators; mean age 42.5
- Population
- Spanish adult meditators in a university mindfulness program and non-meditating community volunteers
- Outcome
- Social-cognition performance associated with meditation experience and dispositional mindfulness
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Inspect source passages
Does practicing meditation improve how we understand others?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
30 participants in the meditator group
A total of 60 participants (meditators, n = 30; non-meditators, n = 30) were enrolled in the study.
36 photographs of the eye region of faces used in the Eyes Test
The Eyes Test (revised version) is a measure comprising 36 photographs of the eye region of the faces of different actors and actresses.
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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