O efeito de uma intervenção breve de meditação da bondade amorosa (loving-kindness meditation) na tomada de decisão pró-social

Abstract

Emotions and social skills such as perspective-taking, empathy, and compassion are fundamental to a highly social, like the human specie. It is considered that prosocial behavior emerged and remained evolutionarily because it presented a survival and reproductive differential for the species. It is suggested that there are stable individual characteristics that favor individuals to be more or less responsive in behaviors that help their co-specific ones, especially the personality trait called agreeableness and one of the affective components of empathy, empathic concern. It has been shown that exercises or mental training can influence the behavioral response to prosociality, and in particular are meditative techniques such as loving-kindness meditation (LKM). There are indications that even short LKM exercises may influence social decision-making by impacting on cognitive control and regulating emotional states, directing behavior towards greater prosociality. The main objective of the present study was to investigate the influence of individual differences, through agreeableness and empathy traits, and the effect of a brief LKM intervention on the prosocial decision-making of unilateral donation of resources and the help intention in different scenarios (travel and disease) as well as the coherence between them. We also investigated the effect of meditative intervention on the participants' emotional state. The sample consisted of 134 undergraduate students, divided into three experimental conditions: LKM, neutral control and positive control. There was correlation between the agreeableness trait and the help intentions in the travel and disease scenarios and a correlation between the empathy trait and the help intention only in the disease scenario. There was no correlation between socialization and empathy scores nor its subcomponents in relation to the task of donating resources to third parties. There was no difference among the experimental groups regarding the donation of resources to third parties nor regarding the help intentions. There was a positive correlation among the three prosocial tasks investigated only in the LKM group. The three experimental groups showed a decrease in negative affects after intervention and there was a reduction of positive affects in the neutral control group. The results suggest that the meditative interventions impact differently on the prosocial decision-making, and the brief intervention of LKM promoted greater coherence in the prosocial decision-making, between the help intention and the effective behavior of donation of resources to third parties. It is considered that the translated and adapted LKM protocol can open the way for future investigations with the use of easy-to-execute and low-cost techniques in Brazil. In addition, it is suggested that it has a potential applicability as a supporting measure for the improvement of subjective well-being through the regulation of emotional states, especially with regard to the reduction of negative affects, and the cognitive and affective controls on the decision-making process in social interactions, potentially reducing conflicts between intention and action.