A study examining whether loving-kindness meditation reduces feelings of loneliness by increasing empathy found that it does not. Loneliness was reduced as much as the control treatment, but empathy was unaffected. The study also found that loneliness was associated with lower self-reported empathy, but not with differences in neural functioning during empathy tasks. The paper is Social cognitive and affective neuroscience.
Loneliness is a subjective feeling that a person’s social relationships are fewer, less intimate, or less satisfying than they would like. This is different from social isolation, which refers to the objective limitation of social contact. A person can feel lonely even when surrounded by others, but people who spend a lot of time alone may not feel lonely.
Loneliness can occur when a person lacks emotional intimacy, companionship, a sense of belonging, or meaningful social support. It can be temporary, such as after moving to a new place or losing a significant relationship, or it can be long-lasting. Prolonged loneliness can lead to greater psychological distress and increase the risk of anxiety and depression. It can also contribute to sleep disturbances, decreased motivation, and difficulty concentrating. Over time, chronic loneliness can affect your physical health by increasing stress and making it difficult to maintain healthy lifestyle habits.
Loneliness is a common human experience and can affect people of all ages and backgrounds. However, research shows that social isolation and loneliness are at an all-time high in the United States. Nearly half of U.S. adults report feeling lonely sometimes or all of the time, indicating that there may be structural factors in the fabric of society that contribute significantly to loneliness.
Study author Mara Dressel and her colleagues conducted a study to investigate whether “compassionate-kindness meditation” increases social connectedness and reduces feelings of loneliness. In particular, we wanted to know whether this intervention could reduce feelings of loneliness by increasing empathy.
Loving Loving Meditation is a meditative practice in which one intentionally cultivates feelings of warmth, compassion, and goodwill towards oneself and others, often by silently repeating compassionate wishes. Research shows that this habit can increase empathy and related helping behaviors, such as generosity. However, it was unclear whether it could also reduce feelings of loneliness.
Study participants were 108 adults in Washington, DC. They were recruited to be demographically representative of adults in the area in terms of age, gender, and ethnicity. Their average age was 40 years. Sixty percent of them were women.
Study participants were divided into two groups. Fifty-five participants completed a compassion meditation training and 53 participants completed a progressive muscle relaxation program. This program was selected to serve as a positive control intervention for comparison due to its non-social nature.
Loving-kindness meditation training was delivered through pre-recorded online sessions. The session was pre-recorded by Sharon Salzberg, a renowned compassion meditation expert. The sessions were aimed at gradually expanding the sense of closeness to oneself, benefactors, neutrals, friends, distant friends, difficult people, groups of individuals, and all beings.
Progressive muscle relaxation sessions are also pre-recorded and read by a female narrator, focusing on a different part of the body in each of the three sessions, including hands and arms, face, head, neck and shoulders, abdomen and buttocks, legs and feet, entire upper body, entire lower body, and entire body. Prerecorded sessions were emailed to participants six days a week (Monday through Saturday). Each session lasted 15 minutes, and there were a total of 24 sessions (4 weeks).
At the beginning of the study, after completing the intervention, and 6 months after completing the intervention, study participants completed ratings of loneliness (UCLA Loneliness Scale-Version 3), social connectedness (Social Connectedness Scale-Revised), and empathy (Interpersonal Responsiveness Index).
A subgroup of 54 participants (both intervention groups) also underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain while completing an empathic pain task after the intervention. In this task, participants met an unknown female who was presented as a research partner. The woman was actually a trained collaborator of the researchers and did not speak to them. During the scan, they watched a live video feed of their own hand and the hand of a research partner receiving pain through a pneumatic device with a rubber probe to which the thumb was connected.
The device was set to induce pain that was rated as slightly severe. The experiment consisted of one in which participants themselves anticipated and experienced pain, and another in which they observed their partner anticipate and experience pain while a device recorded their brain activity. The idea is that seeing a research partner in a pain-inducing situation could trigger an empathetic response, which could be detected as specific patterns of brain activity in the recordings.
Results showed that both treatments (compassionate meditation and a progressive muscle relaxation program) reduced feelings of loneliness but had no effect on empathy. This indicates that the hypothesis that compassion meditation reduces loneliness by increasing empathy is not supported.
The study also found no evidence that loneliness was associated with differences in neural responses in empathic pain tasks. However, loneliness was associated with lower self-reported empathy. Importantly, this means that lonely people exhibit a normal and intact biological empathic response to the pain of others, even though they subjectively rate themselves as having low empathy.
“Taken together, these results suggest that lonely people may simulate the experiences of others but may not subjectively perceive themselves as empathic, highlighting the potential for loneliness interventions to address maladaptive social cognition,” the study authors concluded.
This study contributes to scientific knowledge on how to reduce loneliness. However, it should be noted that participants are aware of the nature of the treatment they are receiving and are likely to be able to infer what the study authors’ expectations are. Given that loneliness was assessed using a self-report measure, expectancy and Hawthorne effects may have influenced the results. In other words, participants may have changed their responses because they expected improvement and knew they were being studied.
The paper, “Lonely people have decreased empathy despite intact neural empathic responses after meditation training,” was authored by Mara Dressel, Naomi Nero, Paige Freeberg, Melinda C. Summers, Joseph S. Ventisink, Ashley S. VanMeter, Sean A. Rose, and Abigail A. Marsh.
