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Abstract

Emerging fields such as the social, affective and cognitive neurosciences have focused on the questions of how people relate to and understand each other. Hereby, the ability for cognitive perspective taking is differentiated from concepts of emotion contagion, empathy, and compassion; the former represents a cognitive route to the understanding of others, the latter a motivational and affective route. Recently, social neurosciences have started to investigate the plasticity of the social brain as well as the trainability of social emotions such as empathy and compassion and its effects on changes in brain functions associated with changes in subjective well-being, pro-social behavior, and health. After a review of recent psychological and neuroscientific findings on the effects of mental training on the brain, subjective experience and behavior, I will provide empirical evidence for socio-affective brain plasticity after mental training of empathy or compassion. While empathy training enhanced negative affect and activation in brain networks associated with suffering, compassion training resulted in an increase of positive affect and activation in brain networks associated to affiliation and care. More importantly, the latter also enhanced prosocial behavior. Finally, I will introduce the ReSource Project, a large-scale multi-disciplinary and methodological one-year secular mental training program with more than 180 participants that aims at the daily cultivation of interoceptive awareness, perspective taking, empathy and compassion as well as prosocial motivation and behavior. First results of this large-scale, multi-method study will be presented and their implication for clinical science and society in general will be discussed.