TY - JOUR

T1 - Know Thy Selves: Learning to Understand Oneself Increases the Ability to Understand Others

AU - Boeckler, Anne

AU - Herrmann, Lukas

AU - Trautwein, Fynn-Mathis

AU - Holmes, Tom

AU - Singer, Tania

N1 - Funding Information: Open access funding provided by Max Planck Society. Tania Singer, as principal investigator, received funding for the ReSource Project from (a) the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013/ERC Grant Agreement Number 205557 to T.S.) and (b) from the Max Planck Society. We are thankful to all the members of the Department of Social Neuroscience involved in the ReSource study over the many years, in particular to all ReSource teachers that taught the intervention program, to Astrid Ackermann, Christina Bochow, Matthias Bolz, and Sandra Zurborg for managing the large-scale longitudinal study, to Hannes Niederhausen, Henrik Grunert, and Torsten Kästner for their technical support, and to Sylvia Tydeks, Elisabeth Murzick, Manuela Hofmann, Sylvie Neubert, and Nicole Pampus for their help with recruitment and data collection. Finally, we would like to thank Dick Schwartz for having developed the IFS model and actively inspired this work in its last phase. Funding Information: Open access funding provided by Max Planck Society. Tania Singer, as principal investigator, received funding for the ReSource Project from (a) the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013/ERC Grant Agreement Number 205557 to T.S.) and (b) from the Max Planck Society.

PY - 2017/6

Y1 - 2017/6

N2 - Understanding others’ feelings, intentions, and beliefs is a crucial social skill both for our personal lives and for meeting the challenges of a globalized world. Recent evidence suggests that the ability to represent and infer others’ mental states (Theory of Mind, ToM) can be enhanced by mental training in healthy adults. The present study investigated the role of training-induced understanding of oneself for the enhanced understanding of others. In a large-scale longitudinal study, two independent participant samples (N = 80 and N = 81) received a 3-month contemplative training. This training focused on perspective taking and was inspired by the Internal Family Systems model that conceives the self as being composed of a complex system of inner personality aspects. Specifically, participants practiced perspective taking on their own inner states by learning to identify and classify different inner personality parts. Results revealed that the degree to which participants improved their understanding of themselves—reflected in the number of different inner parts they could identify—predicted their improvements in high-level ToM performance over training. Especially the number of identified parts that were negatively valenced showed a strong relation with enhanced ToM capacities. This finding suggests a close link between getting better in understanding oneself and improvement in social intelligence.

AB - Understanding others’ feelings, intentions, and beliefs is a crucial social skill both for our personal lives and for meeting the challenges of a globalized world. Recent evidence suggests that the ability to represent and infer others’ mental states (Theory of Mind, ToM) can be enhanced by mental training in healthy adults. The present study investigated the role of training-induced understanding of oneself for the enhanced understanding of others. In a large-scale longitudinal study, two independent participant samples (N = 80 and N = 81) received a 3-month contemplative training. This training focused on perspective taking and was inspired by the Internal Family Systems model that conceives the self as being composed of a complex system of inner personality aspects. Specifically, participants practiced perspective taking on their own inner states by learning to identify and classify different inner personality parts. Results revealed that the degree to which participants improved their understanding of themselves—reflected in the number of different inner parts they could identify—predicted their improvements in high-level ToM performance over training. Especially the number of identified parts that were negatively valenced showed a strong relation with enhanced ToM capacities. This finding suggests a close link between getting better in understanding oneself and improvement in social intelligence.

KW - Internal Family System

KW - Theory of Mind

KW - Self

KW - Inner parts

KW - Contemplative mental training

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85041854759&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s41465-017-0023-6

DO - 10.1007/s41465-017-0023-6

M3 - Article

VL - 1

SP - 197

EP - 209

JO - JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENT

JF - JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENT

SN - 2509-3290

IS - 2

ER -