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Abstract

While social neuroscience has traditionally focused on the questions of how people relate to and understand each other and have thus investigated concepts such as cognitive perspective taking, emotion contagion, empathy, and compassion, the emerging field of contemplative neuroscience has started to investigate the plasticity of the mindful and social brain by assessing the trainability of capacities such as attention and compassion and its effects on changes in brain functions, subjective well-being, pro-social behavior, and health. Combining both fields, the ReSource Project, a large-scale 9-month long longitudinal and multi-disciplinary secular mental training study, aims at the daily cultivation of multiple wholesome qualities such as a) attention and interoceptive awareness, b) socio-affective capacities such as compassion and prosocial motivation, and c) meta-cognitive skills as well as perspective taking on self and others. This workshop will introduce the ReSource model and its different practices and will give an accessible overview of scientific findings of the differential effects of these three 3-months mental training modules on different measures including functional and structural brain-, prosocial behavior, attention- and social cognition-, health-, and stress-markers. Finally, the implications of these findings for the field of contemplative neurosciences as well as for society at large will be discussed.