Loving kindness is practiced by directed well wishing,
typically supported by silent repetition of phrases such as “may X be happy.” In so doing, practitioners cultivate openness, present-centered awareness, and selfless love, toward themselves and others (Salzberg 1995). Loving kindness and related practices such as compassion meditation have been found Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical to enhance positive and diminish negative emotional states, and have shown preliminary utility in the treatment of depression, social anxiety, and stress, among others (for review see Hofmann et al. 2011). Yet little is known about the neural substrate of loving kindness meditation. Related studies have assessed the effects of loving kindness or compassion meditation on the neural response to cognitive or affective tasks. For Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical example, a recent study (Lee et al. 2012) reported that loving kindness meditation led to changes in the neural response to viewing emotional faces, in brain regions implicated in emotion processing, including the left ventral anterior cingulate cortex, right inferior frontal
gyrus (IFG), and right precuneus for happy faces, and the left caudate and middle frontal gyrus for sad faces. Another study (Lutz et al. 2008) found that compassion meditation led to increased Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical activation in brain regions involved in affective processing in response to emotional sounds, including the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and insula. Another recent study (Weng et al. 2013) found that compassion meditation training led to increased altruistic behavior outside of the training context, and associated changes in the neural response to suffering during
post-pre functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in brain regions Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical involved in social cognition and emotion regulation, including the inferior parietal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These neuroimaging studies provide evidence that loving kindness and related meditation practices can alter emotional or affective processing, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical yet do not describe the neural underpinnings of loving kindness meditation without a concurrent task. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess the neural substrate of loving kindness meditation. A prior study from our research group, which was designed to test for common neural activation patterns across three meditation types (Brewer et al. 2011), found that loving below kindness led to reduced blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal in clusters in the inferior temporal gyrus/uncus/amygdala, posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC/PCu), and the inferior parietal lobule, in experienced meditators as compared to novices. Moreover, relatively reduced BOLD signal in meditators in the PCC/PCu—a hub of the default mode network (DMN) involved in BMS-777607 concentration self-related processing and mind wandering (Northoff et al. 2006)—was common across all three meditation types. This study investigates the neural substrate of loving kindness meditation in a larger sample size of meditators and novices.
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