Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY 10075, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2021 Sep 30;16(10):1036-1047. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsab052.
Compassion meditation (CM) is a promising intervention for enhancing compassion, although its active ingredients and neurobiological mechanisms are not well-understood. To investigate these, we conducted a three-armed placebo-controlled randomized trial (N = 57) with longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We compared a 4-week CM program delivered by smartphone application with (i) a placebo condition, presented to participants as the compassion-enhancing hormone oxytocin, and (ii) a condition designed to control for increased familiarity with suffering others, an element of CM which may promote compassion. At pre- and post-intervention, participants listened to compassion-eliciting narratives describing suffering others during fMRI. CM increased brain responses to suffering others in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) relative to the familiarity condition, p < 0.05 family-wise error rate corrected. Among CM participants, individual differences in increased mOFC responses positively correlated with increased compassion-related feelings and attributions, r = 0.50, p = 0.04. Relative to placebo, the CM group exhibited a similar increase in mOFC activity at an uncorrected threshold of P < 0.001 and 10 contiguous voxels. We conclude that the mOFC, a region closely related to affiliative affect and motivation, is an important brain mechanism of CM. Effects of CM on mOFC function are not explained by familiarity effects and are partly explained by placebo effects.
慈悲冥想（CM）是一种增强同情心的有前途的干预措施，尽管其活性成分和神经生物学机制尚未得到很好的理解。为了研究这些，我们进行了一项为期 4 周的三臂安慰剂对照随机试验（N = 57），并进行了纵向功能磁共振成像（fMRI）。我们将智能手机应用程序提供的 4 周 CM 计划与（i）安慰剂条件进行了比较，向参与者展示为增强同情心的激素催产素，以及（ii）旨在控制对他人痛苦的熟悉度的条件，这是 CM 的一个可能促进同情心的元素。在干预前后，参与者在 fMRI 期间听了引发同情心的叙述，描述了他人的痛苦。与熟悉度条件相比，CM 增加了对他人痛苦的大脑反应，在中眶额皮质（mOFC）中，p<0.05 家族误差率校正。在 CM 参与者中，mOFC 反应增加的个体差异与增加的同情心相关感受和归因呈正相关，r=0.50，p=0.04。与安慰剂相比，CM 组在未校正阈值 P<0.001 和 10 个连续体素处表现出类似的 mOFC 活动增加。我们得出结论，mOFC 是与亲和情感和动机密切相关的区域，是 CM 的一个重要大脑机制。CM 对 mOFC 功能的影响不能用熟悉度效应来解释，而部分可以用安慰剂效应来解释。
