Research

Research summaries

Thanks to James Hawkins http://goodmedicine.org.uk/goodknowledge

Empathy and the mirror system

Seeing another person in pain can trigger activity in the observer ’ s own pain cortex. Do these shared neural representations actually reflect empathic neural mirroring, and if so do they correlate with a person ’ s altruism?This study involving 25 individuals who had performed costly altruism (donating a kidney to a stranger) showed that they exhibited more of this self–other neural overlap than 27 matched control participants when witnnessing pain and threat. Results show that heightened neural mirroring of empathy corresponded to real-world altruism.

Brethel-Haurwitz KM et al (2018) Extraordinary altruists exhibit enhanced self–other overlap in neural responses to distress. Psychological Science 29(10):1631–1641.

Secular mindfulness

Secular mindfulness meditation cultivates focused, non-judgemental awareness of the present moment. Study one found that employees who had been randomly assigned to engage in a focused breathing meditation were more willing to donate to a co-worker in financial distress. In study two US insurance company employees who were randomly assigned to a five-day brief mindfulness training reported more helping behaviours. Study three examined the effects of two different mindfulness techniques – focused breathing and loving kindness meditations. The results found strong support for empathy and moderate support for perspective-taking as mediators of the relationship between mindfulness and prosocial behaviour.

Hafenbrack AL et al (2018) Helping people by being in the present: Mindfulness increases prosocial behavior. Academy of Management Journal 2018 (1):12684.

The varieties of love-experience

Is there a shared understanding about when one is most likely to feel loved, and on what gets in the way? In terms of personality, participants higher in trait agreeableness were more in tune with the collective views on felt love, which seems intuitive, but so too were participants higher in neuroticism (ie with low emotional stability, who are known to go through more relationship difficulties on average), which is harder to explain. Perhaps individuals high in neuroticism still experience love, they simply do not have lasting love experiences.The researchers said the main take-away from the research is that ‘ people feel loved in a range of settings much wider than just romantic relationships … ’ , and ‘ although knowledge of love can differ between people, there is a consensus within the US culture about which scenarios elicit love in most people ’ .

Heshmati S et al (2019) What does it mean to feel loved: Cultural consensus and individual differences in felt love. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 36(1): 214–243.

Self-compassion, mental health and wellbeing

Why are self-compassion and its cultivation associated with improved mental health and well-being?This study looked at the effect of two short-term self-compassion exercises on self-reported-state mood and psychophysiological responses compared to three control conditions of negative (rumination), neutral, and positive (excitement). Only the self-compassion exercises triggered reduced psychophysiological arousal (reduced heart rate and skin conductance) and increased parasympathetic activation (increased heart rate variability).This is a pattern associated with effective emotion regulation in times of adversity.As had been expected rumination triggered the opposite pattern across self-report and physiological responses. These findings are partial evidence that the reduction in bodily arousal and increased parasympathetic activation actually precede the mental experience of feeling safe and connected.

Kirschner H et al (2019) Soothing your heart and feeling connected: A new experimental paradigm to study the benefits of selfcompassion. Clinical Psychological Science 7(3): 545–565.

Giving keeps on giving

People adapt to repeated getting: the happiness we feel from identical sources of happiness decreases as we keep repeating them. But do people also adapt to repeated giving – the happiness we feel from helping other people rather than ourselves? When participants spent a windfall of $5 a day on the same item for themselves or another person (the same one each day) happiness significantly declined: similarly for participants who won small sums of money for themselves in 10 rounds of a game. However, there was no decline in happiness among those who spent their windfall on someone else, or who donated their winnings to a charity of their choice.The happiness we get from giving appears to sustain itself.

O’Brien E, Kassirer S (2019) People are slow to adapt to the warm glow of giving. Psychological Science 30(2): 193–204.

Measuring joy

This research looks at joy and its relationship to subjective wellbeing (SWB) and has developed reliable measures of state and trait joy. The studies found not only that dispositional gratitude predicted increases in state joy over time, but also that trait joy predicted increases in state gratitude, providing evidence for an intriguing upward spiral between joy and gratitude.Trait joy was associated with increases in SWB over time.The conclusion is that joy is a discrete positive emotion that can be measured reliably with self-report instruments, and that it may be an important component of well-being.

Watkins PC et al (2018) Joy is a distinct positive emotion:Assessment of joy and relationship to gratitude and well-being. The Journal of Positive Psychology 13(5): 522–539.