hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
In the last decades our society has faced many global and economic problems that call for new solutions and change. Emerging fields such as affective-social and contemplative neurosciences have produced promising findings that may help inform such necessary changes. For example, plasticity research has suggested that training of mental capacities such as empathy, mindfulness and compassion is indeed effective and leads to changes in brain functions associated with increases in positive affect, pro-social behavior, and better health.
I will introduce the ReSource Project, a large-scale multi-methodological one-year secular mental training program that aims at the cultivation of attention, interoceptive awareness, perspective taking, meta-cognition, empathy and compassion, and prosocial motivation. This study also includes new ways of training intersubjective socio-affective and socio-cognitive abilities such as empathy, compassion or cognitive perspective taking on others through daily dyadic practices with another person. This study is divided in three modules allowing us to distinguish effects based on a) attention/mindfulness, b) socio-affective, and c) socio-cognitive training. We assessed, in more than 200 subjects, over 90 measures, such as phenomenological reports, questionnaires, event-sampling data, as well as behavioral, brain, physiological and biological markers. I will present first training-module specific findings such as for example reduction in stress, increase in subjective well-being, enhanced prosocial behavior and plastic brain changes. I will conclude by suggesting ways of how the cultivation of mental faculties and compassion could help formulate new economic models and be introduced in education, businesses and health systems to re-introduce secular ethics in society, thereby emphasizing the need to step into a global responsibility through personal change.
