Browsing by Subject "Compassion"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    A pilot randomized controlled trial comparing a novel compassion and metacognition approach for schizotypal personality disorder with a combination of cognitive therapy and psychopharmacological treatment
    (BMC, 2023-02-20) Cheli, Simone; Cavalletti, Veronica; Lysaker, Paul H.; Dimaggio, Giancarlo; Petrocchi, Nicola; Chiarello, Francesca; Enzo, Consuelo; Velicogna, Francesco; Mancini, Francesco; Goldzweig, Gil; Psychiatry, School of Medicine
    Background: Schizotypal personality disorder is characterized by a pervasive pattern of maladaptive behavior that has been associated with the liability for schizophrenia. Little is known about effective psychosocial interventions. This pilot non-inferiority randomized controlled trial aimed to compare a novel form of psychotherapy tailored for this disorder and a combination of cognitive therapy and psychopharmacological treatment. The former treatment - namely, Evolutionary Systems Therapy for Schizotypy-integrated evolutionary, metacognitively oriented, and compassion focused approaches. Methods: Thirty-three participants were assessed for eligibility, twenty-four randomized on a 1:1 ratio, nineteen included in the final analysis. The treatments lasted 6 months (24 sessions). The primary outcome was change across nine measurements in personality pathology, the secondary outcomes were remission from diagnosis and pre-post changes in general symptomatology and metacognition. Results: Primary outcome suggested a non-inferiority of the experimental treatment in respect to control condition. Secondary outcomes reported mixed results. There was no significant difference in terms of remission, but experimental treatment showed a larger reduction of general symptomatology (η2 = 0.558) and a larger increase in metacognition (η2 = 0.734). Conclusions: This pilot study reported promising results about the effectiveness of the proposed novel approach. A confirmatory trial on large sample size is needed to provide evidence about relative effectiveness of the two treatment conditions.
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    Calling Dr Droid? Why aren’t there any human doctors in Star Wars?
    (The Conversation US, Inc., 2015-01-29) Gunderman, Richard; Radiology and Imaging Sciences, School of Medicine
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    Development and validation of the Single Item Trait Empathy Scale (SITES)
    (Elsevier, 2018-04) Konrath, Sara; Meier, Brian P.; Bushman, Brad J.; Lilly Family School of Philanthropy
    Empathy involves feeling compassion for others and imagining how they feel. In this article, we develop and validate the Single Item Trait Empathy Scale (SITES), which contains only one item that takes seconds to complete. In seven studies (N=5,724), the SITES was found to be both reliable and valid. It correlated in expected ways with a wide variety of intrapersonal outcomes. For example, it is negatively correlated with narcissism, depression, anxiety, and alexithymia. In contrast, it is positively correlated with other measures of empathy, self-esteem, subjective well-being, and agreeableness. The SITES also correlates with a wide variety of interpersonal outcomes, especially compassion for others and helping others. The SITES is recommended in situations when time or question quantity is constrained.
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    Effects of self-transcendence on neural responses to persuasive messages and health behavior change
    (National Academy of Sciences, 2018-10-02) Kang, Yoona; Cooper, Nicole; Pandey, Prateekshit; Scholz, Christin; O'Donnell, Matthew Brook; Lieberman, Matthew D.; Taylor, Shelley E.; Strecher, Victor J.; Dal Cin, Sonya; Konrath, Sara; Polk, Thad A.; Resnicow, Kenneth; An, Lawrence; Falk, Emily B.; Lilly Family School of Philanthropy
    Self-transcendence refers to a shift in mindset from focusing on self-interests to the well-being of others. We offer an integrative neural model of self-transcendence in the context of persuasive messaging by examining the mechanisms of self-transcendence in promoting receptivity to health messages and behavior change. Specifically, we posited that focusing on values and activities that transcend the self can allow people to see that their self-worth is not tied to a specific behavior in question, and in turn become more receptive to subsequent, otherwise threatening health information. To test whether inducing self-transcendent mindsets before message delivery would help overcome defensiveness and increase receptivity, we used two priming tasks, affirmation and compassion, to elicit a transcendent mindset among 220 sedentary adults. As preregistered, those who completed a self-transcendence task before health message exposure, compared with controls, showed greater increases in objectively logged levels of physical activity throughout the following month. In the brain, self-transcendence tasks up-regulated activity in a region of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, chosen for its role in positive valuation and reward processing. During subsequent health message exposure, self-transcendence priming was associated with increased activity in subregions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, implicated in self-related processing and positive valuation, which predicted later decreases in sedentary behavior. The present findings suggest that having a positive self-transcendent mindset can increase behavior change, in part by increasing neural receptivity to health messaging.