Project Compassion– Center for Compassion & Altruism
Research & Education

Research Projects

CCARE’s executive committee has initiated six major research projects on compassion and altruism. These include:

1. Neural Correlates of Compassion in Buddhist Adepts and Novices

Led by noted Stanford psychologist and neuroscientist Brian Knutson, PhD, in collaboration with Thupten Jinpa, Ph.D., the goal of this research is to characterize neural correlates of components of compassion in volunteers with extensive training in compassion meditation (“adepts”) and meditation-naive age and gender matched volunteers (“novices”). Both adepts and novices will be scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) over two days as they engage in a range of tasks related to perceiving social stimuli and engaging in practices related to compassion meditation.

The researchers anticipate being able to localize critical neural components involved in the exercise of compassion. They predict that the parts of the brain related to anticipation of pleasure and pain, as well as those related to self-similarity and readiness to act, will be activated during the exercise of compassion, and may differ between adepts and novices. These studies will establish an fMRI protocol that can be extended to other adepts (e.g., from other countries and traditions), and which could be used to assess the efficacy of compassion training. They will build bridges between Buddhist theory and neuroscientific findings.

2. Is It Better To Give Or To Receive? A Neuroeconomic Research

While every charitable act involves a recipient and a giver, almost all scientific work on altruism has so far focused on giving. This research, being undertaken by neuroeconomists William Harbaugh, PhD of the University of Oregon and Jim Andreoni, PhD of UC San Diego, working with Dr. Doty, is designed to provide a neural explanation for what goes on inside the brains of beneficiaries of charity. Knowledge about how recipients feel about receiving help can guide more effective and more genuinely altruistic methods of giving.

This experiment is designed to determine whether recipients of charity care about how they became eligible for the aid and how much the aid to them costs others. College students who have GPAs above 3.0 and receive financial aid will be subjects in this research. Preliminary behavioral studies show that these students are more likely to accept aid when they are qualified with respect to GPA or need; they prefer merit aid to need aid; and they are less likely to accept aid when it reduces what is available for others. Subjects will turn down charitable gifts when they are not entitled to them, and when they know that taking the money will mean less for other people who are more deserving. There also are circumstances where receiving money can create negative feelings.

The investigators have devised an fMRI experiment to compare areas and intensity of neural activation in response to the source of charity. If the neural data corroborates the behavioral data, the results may significantly change the calculus for donors who want their charity to be effective and generous, in the sense of truly helping the recipients.

3. Does Meditation Increase Compassion? A Psychological Research

In previous studies, Stanford psychologist Jeanne Tsai, PhD and her team found that subjects who took mindfulness meditation training showed increased compassionate behavior compared to a control group that did not receive any training, but to the same degree as a group that took an improvisational theater class. In this study, they will examine whether compassion meditation will increase the different components of compassion more than no training, an improvisational theater class, and a mindfulness meditation class. The improvisational theater class will serve as a control course—like the meditation courses, the improvisational theater class is social and teaches students a new skill.

Before, midway through, and at the end of the course, participants will complete questionnaires that measure their personality, affect (actual and ideal), empathic concern, and their ability to take another person’s perspective. At the end, they will also be evaluated for compassion, using especially devised implicit measurements to test empathy levels and inclinations to charitable giving. Based on previous findings, Tsai predicts that participants in the compassion meditation class will be more compassionate than those in the improvisational theater and mindfulness medication classes, while those receiving no training will register the least compassion. The research team expects that these differences will hold even after controlling for any differences among the groups in personality traits and empathic concern.

4. Investigating the Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms of Compassion Training in Students in Caring Professions

Patients frequently provide their physicians with opportunities to provide empathic responses. However, previous research has found low rates of explicit empathic responses, i.e. good bedside manner, in physicians working with patients with a variety of conditions. An increase in the physician’s ability to demonstrate empathic concern has numerous benefits, including increased patient satisfaction, compliance with recommended treatment, understanding of medical conditions, mental functioning, and reduced emotional distress, anxiety, and complaints to medical regulatory authorities.

This randomized clinical trial, led by Stanford research scientist Philippe Goldin, PhD, in collaboration with Dr. Doty, will examine the immediate and longer-term differential effects of compassion cultivation training versus communication training in caring professions, such as medicine. Researchers will evaluate medical students’ empathic engagement while communicating with patients and will subject them to fMRI testing pre- and post-training. While undergoing fMRI, participants will view film clips of cancer patients describing emotional and physical pain related to their condition. Subjects will also provide continuous ratings of personal emotional distress and empathic concern for the patient.

Goldin expects that the group undergoing compassion cultivation training will exhibit greater compassionate engagement during the physician-patient interaction, as well as greater self- and other-compassion. In effect, the researchers anticipate the participants’ bedside manner will be positively affected by compassion cultivation training.

5. Convergences between Heroism, Compassion, and Altruism

Stanford professor emeritus of psychology Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD and his team, in collaboration with Dr. Doty, will conduct several types of surveys to probe the perceptions and attributions that regular citizens have about heroism, altruism, and compassion. Related experiments will focus on the behavioral precursors of defying unjust authority and becoming a whistle-blower hero.

One survey will be used to analyze perceptions people have of the nature of various actions that qualify as altruistic and or heroic when practiced by various people, such as police, firefighters, military or ordinary citizens. In another survey, the team has identified those who believe that they have acted heroically and in what manner. A content analysis of those acts will establish ordinary people’s definition of heroism by specific behaviors.

Subjects will be placed into the roles of coaches giving increasingly hostile comments to a performer, ostensibly to help improve his performance. At some point, the performer will seem to personally suffer from the hostile comments and begin to cry. The goal is to examine whether the subjects comply with the experimenter’s request to continue the comments or defy the latter’s authority. The question is whether this act of heroism can be predicted by pre-knowledge of participant’s scores on measures of empathy, compassion, and altruism.

In a companion study, new subjects will be asked to ostensibly help the researchers recruit others for the “coaching” study by making a video tape encouraging them to sign on. In their preparation, subjects will view a video from the prior study showing the “student-performer” breaking down from of the hostile feedback. Compliers and defiants will be given an opportunity to support or publicly challenge the research. A subsequent debriefing will serve as a “moral education” opportunity, with compliers and defiants and whistle-blowers separately discussing what should be learned from this experience to guide future behaviors.

6. Neural Networks of Social Compassion and Nurturing: Optical Deconstruction of Altruistic Behavior

Stanford psychiatrist and bioengineer Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD has invented a new field called optogenetics, combining optics and genetics to probe mammalian neural circuits at the high speeds (millisecond-timescale) needed to understand brain information processing. Deisseroth proposes to use this technology to study the neural basis of social compassion in the mammalian brain. He and his team, in collaboration with Dr. Doty and CCARE, will undertake a focused and ambitious definition of the causal neural codes that underlie the most fundamental of mammalian social behaviors.

Deisseroth’s lab will use mutant mice lines with altered social behavior, including stunted nurturing, decreased sociability, and increased social behavior. Nurturing is a fundamental form of socially compassionate and empathetic behavior that can be readily studied in animals. The mutant mice with altered nurturing leave their young scattered around the nest to die of exposure.

Deisseroth’s team will use their optogenetic tools to see if they can switch on the social behavior-associated neural networks in the mice exhibiting a lack of compassion to their young and change them into parents exhibiting socially-appropriate care. In the others, they will analyze the mice’s social approach, social novelty, and social communication.

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