| Abstract/Results: | ABSTRACT:
Mindfulness can be defined as paying attention to the present moment with a non-judgmental, accepting stance. Mindfulness both as a stable trait and as a mental state can be trained through meditation, a form of secular mind-body technique aimed at increasing the ability to focus on bodily awareness and mental events with the prospect of cultivating equanimity and awareness. Mindfulness practice has a strong effect on interoception and body awareness, as well as on the perception of the boundaries of the body. In fact, mindfulness practice can alter the peripersonal space (PPS) perception. On the other hand, mindfulness has been shown to increase social skills such as empathy, compassion, altruism, and promoting self-others connectedness in general. While the interoceptive and bodily effects are clearly related to the nature of the basic meditation practice, i.e., paying attention to breathing and body sensations, how such a solipsistic practice can affect social skills remains largely unexplained.
In this talk, we present our hypothesis that mindfulness would affect social skills by primarily altering the perception of the body and its boundaries. In particular, we hypothesized that the increase in interoceptive abilities due to mindfulness meditation would lead to an alteration in PPS perception, which has been proposed to be implied in the perception of social boundaries between the self and the others as the space where social interactions take place. Therefore, this PPS alteration would, in turn, affect the social capabilities by changing how others relate to the self and its surrounding, personal space. This new proposed framework aims to connect bodily awareness and interoception to social abilities, with the mediation of the PPS representations. As mindfulness affects all these domains, it plays a pivotal role in this framework and can allow us to study the pattern of relationships between such representations and how mindfulness affects this pattern, with both theoretical and practical revenues. We present some experimental data collected within this framework to support our proposal.
In the experiments, we assessed the extension of PPS with the audio-tactile task developed by Serino and colleagues (2012, 2013) and of the personal space with the stop-distance task, in both experienced meditators and non-meditators, and before and after a short practice. We also collected the meditation
expertise of participants and their trait measures such as mindfulness, interoception abilities, and social skills. Our results show how a short mindfulness induction is able to change the PPS boundaries, increasing its extent and reducing its sharpness, while at the same time it reduces the personal space, i.e., participants report a closer distance from a confederate before starting to feel social discomfort.
Overall, these results support the functionality of our framework and our main hypothesis: mindfulness seems
to promote a more open and accepting stance in social experience with others by shaping bodily and PPS awareness.
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