Helping People by Being in the Present: Mindfulness Increases Prosocial Behavior

Abstract

The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of the record. Please see the repository URL above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.

How does brief guided mindfulness meditation enhance empathic concern in novice meditators?: A pilot test of the suggestion hypothesis vs. the mindfulness hypothesis

“…The results concur with the findings by Hafenbrack et al ( 2019 ) who found that brief sitting (breathing) meditation and love kindness meditation increased a variety of employee prosocial behaviors in simulated work contexts. By contrast, our results are partly consistent and partly inconsistent with Ridderinkhof et al’s ( 2017 ) study on the effect of brief sitting meditation.…”

“…By contrast, our results of Study 1 do not differ between the two types of meditation in the effect of increased empathy and helping intention in the inaccessible conditions, thus providing evidence that the novice meditators enhanced perspective taking for disabled people, despite the type of meditation. The possible differences in the mediating factors between Hafenbrack et al’s ( 2019 ) study and our Study 1 may be due to the consistent scenarios employed for assessing both empathy and helping intention in the present study. Digging deeper, we would like to discuss a few more possible mechanisms underlying the influence of mindfulness on empathic concern, including values clarification, cognitive, emotional and behavioral flexibility, social desirability and response bias.…”

“…At the time of this writing, we found an in-press article by Hafenbrack et al ( 2019 ) who had demonstrated that state mindfulness, induced by brief sitting meditation and love kindness meditation, had increased self ratings of compassionate responding in a workplace scenario. Whereas empathy mediated the increase in the compassionate response after love kindness meditation, perspective taking mediated the increase in the compassionate response after sitting meditation.…”

“…The scale consists of 13 items to tap into curiosity of current experience (6 items) and decentered awareness (i.e., awareness of experience with some distance, or meta awareness) (7 items). This scale has been used for manipulation check of brief mindfulness meditation (e.g., Hafenbrack et al 2019 ).…”

Being in the Moment So You Can Keep Moving Forward: Mindfulness and Rumination Mediate the Relationship between Attachment Orientations and Negative Conflict Styles

“…In the past thirty years, there has been growing attention in the field of psychology examining the benefits of mindfulness for psychological well-being. Mindfulness practices have been associated with benefits for coping with stress, anxiety, and depression [ 23 , 25 , 26 , 27 ], improving compassion and increasing prosocial (e.g., helping or relationship-promoting) behaviors [ 28 , 29 , 30 ], bolstering attention and working (e.g., short-term) memory [ 31 , 32 ], improving self-regulatory abilities (e.g., self-control) [ 33 ], and supporting physical health [ 34 , 35 , 36 ]. Several papers suggest that the positive effects of mindfulness may occur through increased attention control, emotion regulation abilities, and self-awareness, which are associated with improved self-regulation skills [ 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 ].…”