Plasticity of the the social brain: Training social emotions such as empathy and compassion and its effects on brain, well-being, health, and behavior

In the last decades, plasticity research has suggested that training of mental capacities such as attention, mindfulness and compassion is effective and leads to changes in brain functions associated with increases in positive affect, pro-social behavior, and better health. I will introduce the ReSource Project, a large-scale multi-methodological one-year secular mental training program. Participants were trained in three separate modules allowing us to distinguish effects based on a) attention and interoceptive body awareness training (Presence), b) care, compassion and emotion-regulation training (Affect), and c) Theory of Mind and meta-cognitive awareness training (Perspective). We assessed data from more than 300 training and control subjects, with over 90 measures including subjective measures, questionnaires, event-sampling data, a variety of behavioral, brain, physiological and biological data. I will present first evidence of training-module specific changes in markers of both, functional and structural brain plasticity, stress reduction, subjective well-being, mind-wandering, and different psychological as well as economic measures assessing social cognitive capacities and prosocial behavior. These findings will be discussed in relation to their meaning for models of social cognition, plasticity research in general, and their importance to initiate societal change