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Getting closer: compassion training increases feelings of closeness toward a disliked person

Evidence-based interventions to favor more harmonious interactions in difficult relationships remain scarce. This study examined whether compassion training may have beneficial effects in an ongoing tense relationship with a disliked person, by reducing schadenfreude toward them and increasing felt...

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Autores principales: Cernadas Curotto, Patricia, Halperin, Eran, Sander, David, Klimecki, Olga
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10603062/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37884610
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-45363-1
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author Cernadas Curotto, Patricia
Halperin, Eran
Sander, David
Klimecki, Olga
author_facet Cernadas Curotto, Patricia
Halperin, Eran
Sander, David
Klimecki, Olga
author_sort Cernadas Curotto, Patricia
collection PubMed
description Evidence-based interventions to favor more harmonious interactions in difficult relationships remain scarce. This study examined whether compassion training may have beneficial effects in an ongoing tense relationship with a disliked person, by reducing schadenfreude toward them and increasing felt interpersonal closeness. 108 participants were assigned to one of three 5-week trainings in a longitudinal randomized controlled study: compassion training, reappraisal training (emotion regulation control condition), or Italian language training (neutral active control condition). The disliked person was not targeted during the trainings to test potential transfer effects. Misfortune scenarios and a measure of interpersonal closeness were used to test whether schadenfreude and closeness feelings toward a disliked person changed from pre- to post-training, across different experimental and control groups. Only compassion and reappraisal trainees reported a decrease of schadenfreude feelings toward the disliked person compared to their pre-training ratings, no changes were observed in the Italian language training. Importantly, feelings of closeness toward the disliked person increased in the compassion training group compared to the other two groups. This increase of closeness feelings could be a central mechanism for improving social interactions. These transfer effects open new perspectives concerning emotion regulation interventions in conflict resolution.
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spelling pubmed-106030622023-10-28 Getting closer: compassion training increases feelings of closeness toward a disliked person Cernadas Curotto, Patricia Halperin, Eran Sander, David Klimecki, Olga Sci Rep Article Evidence-based interventions to favor more harmonious interactions in difficult relationships remain scarce. This study examined whether compassion training may have beneficial effects in an ongoing tense relationship with a disliked person, by reducing schadenfreude toward them and increasing felt interpersonal closeness. 108 participants were assigned to one of three 5-week trainings in a longitudinal randomized controlled study: compassion training, reappraisal training (emotion regulation control condition), or Italian language training (neutral active control condition). The disliked person was not targeted during the trainings to test potential transfer effects. Misfortune scenarios and a measure of interpersonal closeness were used to test whether schadenfreude and closeness feelings toward a disliked person changed from pre- to post-training, across different experimental and control groups. Only compassion and reappraisal trainees reported a decrease of schadenfreude feelings toward the disliked person compared to their pre-training ratings, no changes were observed in the Italian language training. Importantly, feelings of closeness toward the disliked person increased in the compassion training group compared to the other two groups. This increase of closeness feelings could be a central mechanism for improving social interactions. These transfer effects open new perspectives concerning emotion regulation interventions in conflict resolution. Nature Publishing Group UK 2023-10-26 /pmc/articles/PMC10603062/ /pubmed/37884610 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-45363-1 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Cernadas Curotto, Patricia
Halperin, Eran
Sander, David
Klimecki, Olga
Getting closer: compassion training increases feelings of closeness toward a disliked person
title Getting closer: compassion training increases feelings of closeness toward a disliked person
title_full Getting closer: compassion training increases feelings of closeness toward a disliked person
title_fullStr Getting closer: compassion training increases feelings of closeness toward a disliked person
title_full_unstemmed Getting closer: compassion training increases feelings of closeness toward a disliked person
title_short Getting closer: compassion training increases feelings of closeness toward a disliked person
title_sort getting closer: compassion training increases feelings of closeness toward a disliked person
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10603062/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37884610
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-45363-1
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