Meditation Enhances Compassionate Behavior: Study

Meditation is a mental discipline and greatly helps in reducing stress. A recent study focuses on the impact of meditation on interpersonal harmony and compassion, according to a news release.

The study, conducted by researchers at the Northeastern University and Harvard University, observed the effects of meditation on compassion and righteous behavior.

The study required participants to take part in a complete eight-week training consisting of two types of meditation. They were put to test on completion of the training.

In the test, the participants were placed in a room that had three chairs and two actors. One chair was empty. The second actor would enter the room using crutches and the actors in the room would ignore the person with crutches, engaging in some other activity like fiddling with a phone or reading a book.

Through this test, study lead author David DeSteno and Paul Condon wanted to check if the participants who attended the meditation training would help the person who was using crutches, or ignore him like the rest.

Researchers wanted to examine if mediation really enhances compassionate behavior.

They noticed that among the non-mediating participants, only 15 percent pretended to help; but among those who attended the meditation training, 50 percent of the participants offered help.

"The truly surprising aspect of this finding is that meditation made people willing to act virtuous - to help another who was suffering - even in the face of a norm not to do so," DeSteno concluded.

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science.