Anne Muehlethaler

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1198424/full

EFFECTS OF LOVING-KINDNESS MEDITATION ON PROSOCIAL

BEHAVIOR: EMPIRICAL AND META-ANALYTIC EVIDENCE

ABSTRACT

• Purpose. Brief Loving-Kindness meditation (LKM) is introduced here as a valid social

marketing intervention. LKM positively influences prosocial cognitions and affects.

However, it remains unclear whether brief meditation interventions can influence

prosocial behavior. This study aims to provide evidence of the effects of short LKM on

prosocial behavior.

But the deeper terrain of meditation is often shrouded in hazy platitudes. You may hear that meditation is about “awakening,” “liberation,” or jubilantly realizing the inherent emptiness of all phenomena, at which point you’d be forgiven for tuning out. Descriptions of more advanced meditation often sound … weird, and therefore, inaccessible or irrelevant to most people.

…

Which might leave you wondering why it’s mindful relaxation that gets all the attention. For one thing, there’s how much time we imagine deeper meditation practices will take — we’ll get into that later in this course. Another obstacle blocking advanced meditation’s path into the mainstream is that a critical mass of Americans aren’t exactly itching to become full-on Buddhists. But if you turned to science instead of religion for guidance on these meditation practices in the past few decades, you’d mostly find a bunch of scattered neuroscience jargon that doesn’t all hang together.