Lonely individuals see themselves as less empathic, study finds

A study examining whether the Loving Kindness Meditation reduces loneliness by increasing empathy found that it does not. While it did reduce loneliness as much as the control treatment, empathy was not affected. The study also found that loneliness was associated with lower self-reported empathy, but not with differences in neural functioning during an empathy task. The paper was published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Loneliness is the subjective feeling that a person’s social relationships are fewer, less close, or less satisfying than they would like them to be. It is different from social isolation, which refers to having objectively limited social contact. A person can feel lonely even when surrounded by other people, while someone who spends a lot of time alone may not feel lonely.

Loneliness may arise when a person lacks emotional closeness, companionship, belonging, or meaningful social support. It can be temporary, for example after moving to a new place or losing an important relationship, or it can persist over a long period. Prolonged loneliness is associated with greater emotional distress and an increased risk of anxiety and depression. It may also contribute to sleep difficulties, reduced motivation, and poorer concentration. Over time, chronic loneliness can affect physical health by increasing stress and making it harder to maintain healthy routines.

Loneliness is a common human experience that can affect people of any age and background. However, studies indicate that social isolation and loneliness have reached an all-time high in the United States. Nearly half of U.S. adults report sometimes or always feeling lonely, indicating that there may be structural factors in the organization of society that seriously contribute to loneliness.

Study author Marla Dressel and her colleagues conducted a study in which they explored whether Loving Kindness Meditation would increase social connectedness and reduce loneliness. In particular, they wanted to know whether this intervention can reduce loneliness by increasing empathy.

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Loving Kindness Meditation is a contemplative practice in which a person deliberately cultivates feelings of warmth, compassion, and goodwill toward themselves and others, often by silently repeating benevolent wishes. Studies have indicated that this practice can increase empathy and related helping behaviors like generosity. However, it was unknown whether it can reduce loneliness as well.

Study participants were 108 adults from Washington, DC. They were recruited to be demographically representative of the adults in the region in terms of age, gender, and ethnicity. Their average age was 40 years. Sixty percent of them were women.

Study participants were divided into two groups. Fifty-five participants completed the Loving Kindness Meditation training, while 53 participants completed the Progressive Muscle Relaxation program, a program chosen to act as an active control intervention for comparison due to its non-social nature.

The Loving Kindness Meditation training was conducted through pre-recorded online sessions. The sessions were pre-recorded by renowned Loving Kindness Meditation expert Sharon Salzberg. Sessions were aimed at progressively expanding feelings of closeness with the self, a benefactor, a neutral person, a friend, a distant friend, a difficult person, a group of individuals, and all beings.

The Progressive Muscle Relaxation sessions were also pre-recorded, read by a female narrator, and involved focusing on a different part of the body every three sessions, including hands and arms, face, head, neck and shoulders, abdomen and buttocks, legs and feet, all upper body, all lower body, and the whole body. The pre-recorded sessions were sent via email to participants six days per week (Monday through Saturday). Each session lasted 15 minutes and there was a total of 24 sessions (4 weeks).

At the start of the study, after completing the interventions, and six months after completing the interventions, study participants completed assessments of loneliness (the UCLA Loneliness Scale – Version 3), social connectedness (the Social Connectedness Scale – Revised), and empathy (the Interpersonal Reactivity Index).

A subgroup of 54 participants (from both intervention groups) also underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging of their brains while completing an empathic pain task following the intervention. In this task, participants met a female stranger presented as their study partner who was actually a trained confederate of the researchers and who did not talk to them. During scanning, they viewed live video feeds of their own hand and the hand of their study partner receiving pain through a pneumatic device with a rubber probe their thumbs were connected to.

The device was set to produce pain rated as slightly intense. The experiment consisted of one run in which participants anticipated and experienced pain themselves, and another run in which they observed their partner anticipating and experiencing pain while the device recorded their brain activity. The idea is that viewing the study partner in a situation that causes pain would elicit empathy reactions, which could potentially be detectable as specific patterns of brain activity in the recordings.

Results showed that both treatments (the Loving Kindness Meditation and the Progressive Muscle Relaxation program) reduced loneliness but had no effect on empathy. This indicated that the hypothesis that the Loving Kindness Meditation would reduce loneliness by increasing empathy was not supported.

The study also found no evidence that loneliness is associated with differences in neural responding in the empathic pain task. However, loneliness was associated with lower self-reported empathy. Crucially, this means that lonelier individuals exhibit normal, intact biological empathic responses to the pain of others, even though they subjectively evaluate themselves as being less empathic.

“Together, these results suggest that lonelier individuals simulate others’ experiences but may not subjectively perceive themselves as empathetic, emphasizing the potential of loneliness interventions that address maladaptive social cognition,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about ways to reduce loneliness. However, it should be noted that participants were aware of the nature of the treatment they were undergoing and could likely infer what study authors’ expectations were. Given that loneliness was assessed using a self-report measure, it is possible that the expectancy effect and the Hawthorne effect might have affected the results. In other words, it is possible that participants altered their responses because they expected improvement and knew they were being studied.

The paper, “Lonelier people feel less empathic despite intact neural empathy responses after meditation training,” was authored by Marla Dressel, Naomi Nero, Paige Freeburg, Melinda C. Somers, Joseph S. Venticinque, Ashley S. VanMeter, Shawn A. Rhoads, and Abigail A. Marsh.