The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education

Stanford School of Medicine
The Center for Compassion And Altruism Research And Education

Dr. Kelly McGonigal

Sounds True Presents Compassionate Brain Feat. Dr. Kelly McGonigal

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The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education > Articles by: Dr. Kelly McGonigal

The Compassionate Brain

Activating the Neural Circuits of Kindness, Caring, and Love – Practical Neuroscience for Transformation

Dr. Rick Hanson presents a FREE seven-part video series—The Compassionate Brain—that explores effective ways to change your brain and heart and life.

Each week Dr. Hanson will be joined by a world-class scholar/teacher, including Richie Davidson, Dan Siegel, Tara Brach, Dacher Keltner, Kelly McGonigal, Kristin Neff, and Jean Houston. They’ll discuss different ways to use the power of neuroplasticity—how the mind can change the brain to transform the mind—to open the heart, build courage, find compassion, forgive oneself and others, and heal the world.

Can’t make a live session? On-demand streaming videos will be available a few days after each session’s conclusion.

For technical issues, please contact customerservice@soundstrue.com.

Featuring Dr. Kelly McGonigal in Session 5:
Balancing Compassion and Assertiveness
Monday, November 5, 2012, from 8–9 pm Eastern Time (GMT –5)
With Dr. Kelly McGonigal, senior teacher and consultant for the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and author of The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It

To listen, register for free here.

 

What Does Compassion Look Like?

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The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education > Articles by: Dr. Kelly McGonigal

Can you tell who is compassionate just by looking at them?

According to a new study, yes.

Imagine this: you walk into the laboratory, and are a shown a series of 20-second video clips. In each clip, a different person is listening to someone else speaking. You can’t hear what the speaker is saying; there is no sound to the clip. But you’re told that the speaker is talking about a time when he or she suffered.

The researchers ask you to rate how compassionate the listener is, just by what you can see: his or her body language and facial expressions.

This study was conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, who found that people agreed on who was a compassionate listener. The participants all seemed to rely on the same cues to assess compassion: more open body language, eye contact, head nods, and smiling.

I was excited to see this finding because I teach compassionate listening as a skill in the Stanford Compassion Training. Students in the training learn to deliberately do exactly what the participants in this study were using to assess compassion.

The first step is what I call “listening with the whole body.” This means literally tuning in to the person who is speaking. “Compassionate” body language includes:

To read the entire blog post, click here.

Hugging Yourself Reduces Physical Pain

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The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education > Articles by: Dr. Kelly McGonigal

Cheaper than a massage, and fewer side effects than popping pills: A new study reports that crossing your arms can significantly relieve pain.

Twenty brave participants (12 of them women) allowed scientists to inflict pain via pulses of radiant heat from an infrared laser. The laser was aimed at the sensitive radial nerve of the forearm. During some bursts of pain, participants had their arms crossed in front of them. In those trials, participants reported significantly reduced sensations of pain. Researchers also were monitoring brain activity with an EEG. During arms-crossed trials, the participants’ brains showed smaller spikes of activity suggesting pain processing.

The research team, led by neuroscientist Giandomenico Iannetti from University College London, UK, speculates that crossing the arms confuses the brain. The researchers write, “Crossing the hands over the body midline impairs [the brain’s] ability to localize tactile stimuli.” More specifically, information about the right side of the body appears to be coming in through the nervous system from the left side of the body, and vice/versa. The fact that participants could see their own hands added to the brain’s confusion – because it looked like the right hand was the left hand, and vice/versa.

To read the entire blog post, click here.

 

The Power of Self-Compassion

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The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education > Articles by: Dr. Kelly McGonigal

The number one most emailed article on the New York Times, at the time I’m writing this, is a blog post by Tara Parker-Pope on the importance of self-compassion for making a change such as losing weight or quitting smoking.

It is striking that the article is the most emailed — clearly it strikes a chord among the typical self-critical, stressed out reader — but also is followed by an avalance of negative comments, saying things like: “Oh good grief! Americans think so highly of themselves as it is. Really there shouldn’t be more encouragement, ” and ” if we don’t hold ourselves to high performance standards, how can we, ethically and morally, expect others to meet those standards?” These comments reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of what self-compassion is, how it contributes to (not undermines) self-accountability, and how it differs from self-esteem.

I recently gave a 15-minute talk at the Stanford Happiness Conference about the importance of self-compassion and the research on how it helps us maintain — not abandon — our standards and succeed at our goals, as well as increase happiness and decrease depression. Watch it here.

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