Prospective studies following novices over the course of training in loving kindness are needed to test these interpretations. Further group differences were found in the ICD of functional connectivity between meditators and novices during loving kindness meditation. A difference in ICD indicates that a given brain region shows altered connectivity to the rest of the brain on average. Here, meditators showed less ICD than novices overall, and in clusters including the bilateral

IFG and insula; MCC and dACC; Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the PCu; and the right supramarginal gyrus and temporal gyrus. With regard to group differences in ICD in the right parietal and temporal regions, the right TPJ has been implicated in theory of mind and empathy, including the attribution of mental states (Saxe and Wexler 2005), the sense of agency, and reorienting attention to salient stimuli (Decety and Lamm 2007). Less ICD in

this brain region during loving kindness in meditators as compared to novices may again reflect less self-related processing or mentalizing, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical or possibly a difference in attentional processes between groups. However, such interpretations would need to be tested by comparing loving kindness with for example a mentalizing task. With regard to group differences in intrinsic Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical connectivity in the bilateral IFG and insula, the IFG has been implicated in emotion processing, from emotional feeling to emotion simulation and empathy (Jabbi and Keysers 2008; Shamay-Tsoory et al. 2009). Prior studies of the effects of loving kindness or compassion meditation on emotion processing have reported changes in the IFG and anterior insula (Lutz et al. 2008; Lee et al. 2012; Weng et al. 2013). Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical For example, a recent study found that compassion meditation training led to improved empathic accuracy on the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test’ in which subjects are asked to infer others’ mental states from viewing their eyes, and this was associated with greater BOLD FK866 concentration signal in

the bilateral Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical IFG (Mascaro et al. 2013). Related to this, group differences in ICD were found in the MCC and dACC. A recent meta-analysis of fMRI studies of empathy found consistent activations in the anterior middle cingulate cortex (aMCC), dACC, heptaminol supplementary motor area, and anterior insula/IFG, with the aMCC more frequently reported in studies of cognitive-evaluative empathy, where subjects are explicitly instructed to evaluate others’ emotional or sensory states (Fan et al. 2011). Related to the current findings, it is possible that novices engage in more emotional processing related to empathy during loving kindness meditation than meditators. Another interpretation is that meditators rely less on language processing during loving kindness, given that the left IFG is considered the neuroanatomical basis of inner speech (e.g., McGuire et al.