Loving kindness is a form of meditation involving directed well-wishing, typically supported by the silent repetition of phrases such as "may all beings be happy," to foster a feeling of selfless love. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the neural substrate of loving kindness meditation in experienced meditators and novices. We first assessed group differences in blood...

Kindness involves care and non-judgmental understanding toward someone. As a prosocial inclination, kindness would increase the possibility of favorable interaction with the environment, with a successful adjustment of one's response in novel or challenging circumstances, taking into account rules or goals. This adjustment ability is commonly referred to as executive functions, dependent on the...

The present experiment was designed to establish the effects of acts of kindness and acts of novelty on life satisfaction. Participants aged 18-60 took part on a voluntary basis. They were randomly assigned to perform either acts of kindness, acts of novelty, or no acts on a daily basis for 10 days. Their life satisfaction was measured before and after the 10-day experiment. As expected, perfor...

The ideas of cruelty, kindness, and unnecessary suffering play prominent roles in the growing debate over our treatment of animals. An index of how pervasive these ideas are, is that a philosopher who does not rely on them, or not all of them, or who argues in ways that give other ideas a place of prominence, might none the less be viewed as resting his case against, say, vivisection or factory...

The literature on team cooperation has neglected the effects of relative kindness intention on cooperation, which we measure by comparing the kindness intentions of an agent to her group members to the kindness shown by other members to this same agent. We argue that the agent's emotional reaction to material payoff inequity is not constant, but rather affected by her relative kindness intentio...