237 9.7 AFTERWORD How Are Emotions Embodied in the Social
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Wed Apr 18 2018, NEWGEN 2 37 Afterword237 reactions, albeit not on a conceptual level (Condon even flourish in the face of the consequences of & Feldman Barrett, 2013). This suggests that this caring. accessing the positive core of compassion might require some degree of conditioning and training CONCLUSION in order to successfully employ it in daily life. Social emotions such as empathy and com- Several research groups have begun passion are a central aspect of our social lives. investigating how compassion can be trained Through the shared embodiment of emotional through the utilization of meditation techniques states such as in the phenomena of emotion adapted from the Buddhist tradition to a secular contagion and empathy, we gain access to and setting in meditation- naïve participants (e.g., communicate core aspects of our emotional Fredrickson, Cohn, Coffey, Pek, & Finkel, 2008; experiences. However, many barriers exist to this Jazaieri et al., 2013; Klimecki et al., 2013; Klimecki, empathic resonance, including other core social Leiberg, Ricard, & Singer, 2014; Mascaro, Rilling, mechanisms such as our tendency to discrimi- Negi, & Raison, 2013; Weng et al., 2013). In nate in- groups from out- groups. Even when we addition to showing that compassion training is do achieve empathic connection with someone, possible outside of the strict regimes of Buddhist this can become a source of stress, because, un- practice, these results show that such training deniably, sharing affective states with others can has a number of beneficial effects. For instance, be costly. However, as we hope to have shown, in our laboratory, we have found that compas- we are not incurably bound by our biases, but sion training increased positive affect when can actively modulate the occurrence, strength, participants were exposed to highly distressing and type of empathic connection we share with videos depicting people suffering, and that this others.
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