People can be trained to be more compassionate

Adults can be trained to be more compassionate, or be more caring for people who are suffering even those they have conflict with, U.S. researchers say. Lead author Helen Weng, a graduate student in clinical psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said the investigators trained young adults to engage in compassion meditation, an ancient Buddhist technique to increase caring feelings for people who are suffering. In the meditation, participants asked to envision a time when someone suffered and then practiced wishing that his or her suffering was relieved. They repeated phrases to help them focus on compassion such as, "May you be free from suffering. May you have joy and ease." Participants practiced with different categories of people, first starting with a loved one, someone whom they easily felt compassion for such as a friend or family member. Then, they practiced compassion for themselves and, then, a stranger. Finally, they practiced compassion for someone they actively had conflict with called the "difficult person," such as a troublesome co-worker or roommate. "It's kind of like weight training," Weng said in a statement. "Using this systematic approach, we found that people can actually build up their compassion 'muscle' and respond to others' suffering with care and a desire to help." Compassion training was compared to a control group that learned cognitive reappraisal, a technique where people learn to reframe their thoughts to feel less negative. "We found that people trained in compassion were more likely to spend their own money altruistically to help someone who was treated unfairly than those who were trained in cognitive reappraisal," Weng said in a statement.