CBD 2023: Lessons from the ReSource and CovSocial Projects: Ways of addressing a mental health crisis with Tania Singer, PhD

In this talk Tania Singer, PhD will present how to train brain, mind, heart, and social connections taking a social neuroscience perspective and show which benefits the mental training of compassion, mindfulness and other human qualities can have on mental health, resilience, and cooperation. She will present the ReSource Project, a large-scale year-long longitudinal study of the effects of different contemplative practices on brain, health, and behavior. She will further present first results from the CovSocial project that in a first phase aimed to unravel the impact of the Covid19-pandemic on various aspects of mental health, psychological resilience, and social cohesion among the Berlin population in 2020 and 2021 (with 7 measurement time points during two lock-downs). In a second phase, they explored whether they could reduce observed psychological vulnerability during the pandemic and boost resilience and mental with low-dose 10-weeks app-based socio-emotional partner-based dyadic and mindfulness-based daily practices. Dr. Singer will discuss implications of these findings for translational approaches into society.

Prof. Dr. Tania Singer is a social neuroscientist and psychologist heading the Social Neuroscience Lab of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. She is a world expert on empathy and compassion and has a passion for creating bridges between fields that typically never interact such as linking neuroscience with economics, science with arts or science with spirituality. She has initiated and headed one of the largest meditation-based secular mental training studies on compassion, the ReSource project to study the effects of meditation on brain, behavior and mental health. Linking such findings to the field of (neuro)economics, she developed a Caring Economics approach, developing new models of economy based on care and social cohesion. Lately, in the CovSocial project she tested the effect of short mental online training on mental health and resilience during the Covid19 pandemic. One of her main aims is to help to translate this scientific knowledge into different arms of society to provide the basis for deep inner change for larger societal change.

CBD 2023: Lessons from the ReSource and CovSocial Projects: Ways of addressing a mental health crisis with Tania Singer is part of the free Contemplation by Design Summit, Oct. 21- Nov. 3, 2023.

The full Summit schedule is posted at: http://contemplation.stanford.edu/summit. All events are FREE and online.

Registration opens September 12, 2023