Helen Weng is currently a doctoral
student in clinical psychology studying the
Department of Psychology, Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and
Behavior, and Center
for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
Her long-term goals include studying how interventions
that increase love and compassion impact both psychological and physical
health in patients, and how training these qualities in health care
providers can prevent burnout and improve patient outcomes.
Helen conducted a study titled,
Compassion
Training Alters Altruism and Neural Responses to Suffering.
"Compassion is a key
motivator of altruistic behavior, but little is known about individuals’
capacity to cultivate compassion through training. We examined whether
compassion may be systematically trained by testing whether (a) short-term
compassion training increases altruistic behavior and (b) individual
differences in altruism are associated with training-induced changes in
neural responses to suffering. "
(Video
Transcriptions: If you would like to take empathic action
and create a transcription of this video, check
the volunteers page. The transcriptions will make it easier for
other viewers to quickly see the content of this video.)
"Compassion is a key motivator
of altruistic behavior, but little is known about individuals’ capacity
to cultivate compassion through training. We examined whether compassion
may be systematically trained by testing whether (a) short-term
compassion training increases altruistic behavior and (b) individual
differences in altruism are associated with training-induced changes in
neural responses to suffering. In healthy adults, we found that
compassion training increased altruistic redistribution of funds to a
victim encountered outside of the training context. Furthermore,
increased altruistic behavior after compassion training was associated
with altered activation in brain regions implicated in social cognition
and emotion regulation, including the inferior parietal cortex and
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and in DLPFC connectivity with
the nucleus accumbens. These results suggest that compassion can be
cultivated with training and that greater altruistic behavior may emerge
from increased engagement of neural systems implicated in understanding
the suffering of other people, executive and emotional control, and
reward processing."
"Helen Weng, like thousands of other
Madison residents, is reaching the end of that long crawl toward a Ph.D.
Unlike many of the University of Wisconsin’s underpaid grad students,
Weng already has had a taste of the limelight that is usually reserved
for full-fledged professors. The national journal Psychological Science
recently published a study by Weng that suggests adults can learn to be
more compassionate. How so? Through a meditation CD, of course. And by
repeating nice phrases like “may you have joy and happiness.”"
A new study by researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds
at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that
adults can be trained to be more compassionate. The report,
recently published online in the journal Psychological Science, is the
first to investigate whether training adults in compassion can result in
greater altruistic behavior and related changes in neural systems
underlying compassion. "Our fundamental question was, 'Can compassion be
trained and learned in adults? Can we become more caring if we practice
that mindset?'" says Helen Weng, a graduate student in clinical
psychology and lead author of the paper. "Our evidence points to yes."
"Can people be taught to act more altruistically? Newly published
research, measuring both brain activity and behavior, suggests the
answer just may be yes. “Our findings support the possibility that
compassion and altruism can be viewed as trainable skills rather than
stable traits,” a research team led by Richard J. Davidson and Helen
Weng of the University of Wisconsin-Madison writes in the journal
Psychological Science. Specifically, they report that taking a course in
compassion leads to increased engagement of certain neural systems,
which prompts higher levels of altruistic behavior."
It's hard to admit this, but sometimes I can be kind of a B. Maybe
I had a bad day, maybe I haven't eaten in the last three
hours...but in any case, I've been known to snap at my man or give
the side-eye to the woman taking forever in the grocery checkout
line from time to time. Not. Cool.
But, apparently, harnessing one's chi to be a little bit more
patient, compassionate, and more pleasant to be around in general
is actually pretty easy, at least according to new research from
the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
" A new study shows that adults can be trained to be more compassionate
-- and in a relatively short time. Researchers at the Center for
Investigating Healthy. People seem to become more sensitive to other
people’s suffering, but this is challenging emotionally,” Weng
explained. “They learn to regulate their emotions so that they approach
people’s suffering with caring and wanting to help rather than turning
away.” There are many possible applications of compassion training,
according to Dr. Richard J. Davidson, founder and chair of the Center
for Investigating Healthy Minds and senior author of the article."
There are all sort of things that would make the world better.
Raising the minimum age for members of “Boy Bands” by about 15
years could, for instance, only elevate music and the general
human experience. Changing the name and focus of the film series
“Fast and Furious” to “Slow and Calm” would also be a step in the
right direction. A few stern words of caution to whatever fashion
troll dreamt up the “onesy” would certainly lift the level of the
collective unconscious.
Perhaps greater than any of these much needed steps though, is the
need for a rise in levels of basic human compassion. If this seems
an impossibly lofty goal to you then a new study offers hope
because it shows that compassion is really a matter of training
your brain.
When people teach
themselves compassion, altruistic behavior increases.
...For example, new research demonstrates that you can “learn”
compassion through specific meditative practices fairly quickly;
and, intriguingly, that teaching yourself to become more
compassionate directly translates to altruistic behavior. This
latest study, conducted at the University of Wisconsin’s Center
for Investigating Healthy Minds, founded by Richard Davidson,
the leading researcher in this field, investigated whether you
can train adults to become more compassionate; and whether that
results in greater altruistic behavior and changes in related
brain activity. Well, you can, and it does.
