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Abstract:
With the emergence of the social-affective and contemplative sciences, researchers have started to integrate first-person subjective reports with traditional third-person objective measurements. Plasticity research based on mental training studies would be such an integrated approach and recent findings have suggested that training of mental capacities leads to changes in subjective well-being as well as in brain functions, health, and behavior.
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, compassion, and prosocial motivation. This study also includes new ways of training the mind and socio-cognitive abilities through intersubjective dyads 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 data. I will present first training-module specific findings of brain plasticity, stress-reduction, and prosocial behavior.
Finally, I will discuss challenges related to the appropriate integration of measures of first-person subjective experience and third-person measurements and discuss these in the context of plasticity research in the field of social neurosciences.
