Trial reportSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2013
Compassion meditation enhances empathic accuracy and related neural activity.
Trial report in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT02163941 (Meditation Training for Emotional Numbing in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), which is not on this map. Cited by 65 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Meditation Training for Emotional Numbing in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
Who cites it
65 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 223 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Meditative Mind: A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis of MRI Studies.BioMed research international · 2015Pooled it
- A randomized controlled trial of a compassion-centered spiritual health intervention to improve hospital inpatient outcomes.PloS one · 2025Trial
- Effects of compassion training on brain responses to suffering others.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Trial
- Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCTIntegrative cancer therapies · 2018Trial
- A protocol for a systematic review of the psychosocial effects of experiencing compassion from others and its interpretation through secular and religious frameworks.Systematic reviews · 2026Article
- Applied evolutionary psychology in moral education: a quasi-experimental study exploring the longitudinal associations of compassion training with emotion regulation and prosocial ethical development.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Advances in Neuroimaging and Deep Learning for Emotion Detection: A Systematic Review of Cognitive Neuroscience and Algorithmic Innovations.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Mindfulness, Loving-Kindness, and Compassion-Based Meditation Interventions and Adult Attachment Orientations: A Systematic Map.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Scalable and sustainable approaches to address the well-being of healthcare personnel.Journal of advanced nursing · 2023Article
- Discovering compassion in medical training: a qualitative study with curriculum leaders, educators, and learners.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- A Preliminary Assessment of Compassion Fatigue in Chimpanzee Caregivers.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Early and late neural correlates of mentalizing: ALE meta-analyses in adults, children and adolescents.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- "Today I Can Look in the Mirror and Like Myself": Effects of a Trauma-Informed Mindful Recovery Program on Self-Compassion.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- An updated classification of meditation methods using principles of taxonomy and systematics.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Synchrony During Online Encounters Affects Social Affiliation and Theory of Mind but Not Empathy.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Learning Compassion and Meditation: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of the Experience of Novice Meditators.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Psychiatric Neural Networks and Precision Therapeutics by Machine Learning.Biomedicines · 2021Review
- Cognitive Empathy as Imagination: Evidence From Reading the Mind in the Eyes in Autism and Schizotypy.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Article
- Overcoming the limits of empathic concern: the case for availability and its application to the medical domain.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2020Article
- Primary functional brain connections associated with melancholic major depressive disorder and modulation by antidepressants.Scientific reports · 2020Article
5 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The ability to accurately infer others' mental states from facial expressions is important for optimal social functioning and is fundamentally impaired in social cognitive disorders such as autism. While pharmacologic interventions have shown promise for enhancing empathic accuracy, little is known about the effects of behavioral interventions on empathic accuracy and related brain activity. This study employed a randomized, controlled and longitudinal design to investigate the effect of a secularized analytical compassion meditation program, cognitive-based compassion training (CBCT), on empathic accuracy. Twenty-one healthy participants received functional MRI scans while completing an empathic accuracy task, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), both prior to and after completion of either CBCT or a health discussion control group. Upon completion of the study interventions, participants randomized to CBCT and were significantly more likely than control subjects to have increased scores on the RMET and increased neural activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). Moreover, changes in dmPFC and IFG activity from baseline to the post-intervention assessment were associated with changes in empathic accuracy. These findings suggest that CBCT may hold promise as a behavioral intervention for enhancing empathic accuracy and the neurobiology supporting it.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.