Category: Interviews with the Experts

How did you first become interested in compassion and mindfulness?

Starting in high school, I started reading books about psychology, Buddhist philosophy, and emotional intelligence. Luckily my dad recognized that interest and he gave me books. It was in high school when I read the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama, and Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. My interest came from the struggles I had growing up as one of the only racial minorities in my town, and from the cross-cultural clashes I had with my parents who are Taiwanese immigrants. I wanted to find a form of healing and relief from pain which I’m learning many people share.

I started to realize there were internal characteristics that can ground us in our values and what we care about. For example, compassion could become a value in responding to others’ suffering with kindness. In one of the books, I learned about compassion and it stated that compassion could be developed through meditation. The book also included instructions for compassion meditation that you could practice. I was 15 years old in my bedroom practicing compassion meditation and realized how hard it really was. It grounded me and helped give me a value that could guide me.

It became a deep personal value of mine. I reflected on compassion and tried to express it in my life. In college I ended up majoring in neuroscience and I knew I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. As one expression of compassion, I wanted to see how I could help people with mental health issues. I learned of Richie Davidson’s work where he studied the brain, emotion regulation, and was beginning to study compassion meditation. Our research interests were so well-aligned that it was clear that I should be his graduate student. I had to reach out to him.

I actually wrote about these experiences for my autobiographical essay when I was applying for clinical psychology internship. I recently shared this at the 2016 Mind and Life Summer Research Institute to give people an understanding of how my contemplative practice stems from my experience as a second-generation immigrant and racial minority in the United States, and how these experiences are feeding into my new work.

 You studied mindfulness at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, arguably the epicenter of mindfulness research in the world. Could you tell us a bit about your experience working within that research network?

The Center for Healthy Minds  is very large now. There was never a dull moment. Our central aim was to apply the most rigorous science to meditation and well-being. We tried to use as many objective measures as we could, like brain imaging. I developed economic decision-making paradigms to measure the outcomes of compassion meditation. We wanted to develop measures of compassion where people were unaware of what we were measuring, and that measured observable quantifiable behavior. That was a very tricky scientific endeavor that we eventually figured out.

There is also a very public component of the Center where we really care about disseminating the information to the general public. We believe that everyone has the right to know how to expand their own potential for well-being. We have studied mindful attention, emotion regulation, empathy, and compassion. The question becomes how do we bring this information to the public once the science has been established. To this end, we provide newsletters, classes, and seminars to educate people according to the latest findings.

The Center has grown and they expanded their outreach to schools where they have conducted mindfulness and kindness-based trainings in schools. We released more resources that people can access. For instance, the compassion-based training that I used in my study was a 30-minute daily mediation that is freely available on our site. We showed that if you practice every day for 2 weeks for 30 minutes, it’s enough to increase your generosity to a stranger through the economic paradigms that we’ve created. It was also enough to change how their brains responded to suffering, showing increases in regions associated with empathy and emotion regulation. This is a major part of our mission: to learn these things and then bring them to the greater community.

 What is compassion and how do you develop it?

Compassion is the awareness of somebody’s suffering, and responding with a sense of caring and wanting to help. It can generate a feeling of warmth and connection, and also a desire to relieve that suffering. With compassion meditation, you envision different types of people suffering in your mind and then you practice a compassionate way of responding. So first you have to tune into somebody’s suffering, either emotional or physical. Then there is a desire to relieve that suffering. We think we’re training people to get better at this with practice. Not only does it change your internal state when you encounter somebody suffering, but we think that it also change actual behavior. It transforms an internal state into an external behavior. I think that contemplative practices can affect how we act, interact, and communicate to produce more well-being for ourselves and others.

You studied how compassion training alters altruism and neural responses to suffering. What were the results of this study and why is this important?

We found that compassion meditation training increases altruistic behavior and also how the brain responds to suffering. We came up with an economic behavioral paradigm called the Redistribution Game, which we developed from the behavioral economics literature. Working with my colleague Drew Fox, PhD, we developed a paradigm where the participants witness an unfair economic exchange between two people. They themselves have money, and if they choose to do so, they have the option to spend their own money and redistribute the unequal distribution of funds. The game was described in purely economic terms; they didn’t know we were trying to measure compassionate behavior. That money actually came out of their paychecks so it really meant something. It’s a model for altruism: spending one’s own money to promote equality. You can see how this model theoretically translates to other forms of inequality that we encounter every day.

We took members from the Madison, Wisconsin community who had no meditation experience. Twenty of them learned compassion meditation using a guided audio practice. In the compassion mediation group, they practiced envisioning different kinds of people suffering: first a loved one, themselves, a stranger, and then somebody they might find difficult. They have to imagine each person suffering then practice wishing them relief from their suffering. They repeat compassion-generating phrases such as “May you be free of suffering.” The compassion group did that every day for two weeks.

Twenty-one people in the control group learned cognitive reappraisal. Participants learned to think about situations in different ways to make them less stressful, essentially changing their thoughts to improve their feelings. We put both groups in the brain scanner before and after the two weeks in their respective courses to measure how their brains would respond to images of suffering. We showed them pictures of people in pain, both emotional and physical pain. Then we also showed them pictures of everyday neutral situations.

The compassion group had to evoke compassion for the people in the pictures, and the cognitive reappraisal group had to reinterpret the meaning of the pictures to decrease their negative feelings. What we found is that after only two weeks of practicing, the compassion group spent more money in the redistribution game to help out a stranger compared to the cognitive reappraisal group. This showed that just two weeks of practice was enough to change how the compassion group treated other people.

“This showed that just two weeks of practice was enough to change how the compassion group treated other people.”

We then learned how much a person was willing to spend was associated with how much their brains changed from the meditation. So people who showed a greater increase in the brain region involved with empathy, called the inferior parietal cortex, were also the ones who gave more to the stranger in the game. This links objective neurological responses to behavioral outcomes. Within this context, this data suggests that the way you perceive suffering is related to how you treat someone.

One of the implications is that compassion is not just something you’re born with. We all have a certain dispositional level of compassion. However, we can practice and get better at it. Using the parallel of practicing an instrument; the more you practice, the better you get. If you practice compassion, it might shift the meaning of what somebody else’s suffering means to you, which might change the way you treat people and could ultimately make you a more caring person.

“If you practice compassion, it might shift the meaning of what somebody else’s suffering means to you, which might change the way you treat people and could ultimately make you a more caring person.”

Is the heightened neurological activation seen in the brain permanent, or do effects weaken over time without continued compassion training?

We don’t have the data yet to know that. We would need more data that measure our participants over time. We do see differences in long-term meditators who practice compassion meditation. Those practitioners show more activation in regions associated with empathy like the insula. We would need some studies that follow people over time as they practice. I am curious to know how much you need to practice to maintain a stable level of compassion. As with most things, if you continue to practice, those skills become more stable.

How did you become involved with the Mind and Life Institute?

I read the books that they were publishing and was introduced to Richie Davidson’s work. I started going to the conferences at the Summer Research Institute, which invites scholars in the field from difference disciplines and encourages interdisciplinary discussion.

I applied to a Varela Award in 2006, offered by the Mind and Life Institute, to fund part of my compassion meditation study. I was fortunate to receive the award and they started to invite me to speak as a Varela awardee. Last year, I was awarded another Varela Award for my postdoctoral work to increase the racial and ethnic diversity within studies of contemplative neuroscience. At this year’s Summer Research Institute, they invited me to be a faculty member to speak on my new work, which was a great honor. My teams at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine and the UCSF Neuroscape Center, directed by Dr. Adam Gazzaley, are collaborating with the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, CA.