Psychology› Clinical Psychology› Mindfulness and Compassion Interventions

Social cognition — Brief mindfulness or facial emotion recognition training

Submitted 2026-10-22

Field: Psychology › Clinical PsychologyType: No effect foundArea: social cognitionTarget: Brief mindfulness or facial emotion recognition trainingStage: pilot

Hypothesis

A brief mindfulness exercise or facial emotion recognition training would immediately improve empathic accuracy — how well people infer others' emotions.

What failed

Across three conditions of 23 psychology students each (mindfulness, emotion-recognition training, neutral lecture control), there was no significant overall difference in empathic accuracy, so neither target intervention had an effect.

Broken assumption

Empathic accuracy is acutely malleable by a single brief intervention.

Why

The paper reports only one qualification: among participants with limited understanding of the task's Dutch-language material, accuracy was better after emotion-recognition training than control. The authors list a small convenience sample, a mindfulness lecture as control, no baseline measure and no formal language assessment as limitations.

From the published paper: Rot et al. Journal of Trial and Error, 2023. ↗CC BY

Research ideas from this failure

Unvetted lead — read the papers

New hypotheses this failure suggests, each with a crucial experiment, a rival explanation of the original result, and the papers it rests on. Written by AI from paper titles and abstracts found on OpenAlex (and Europe PMC, for life and health sciences).

Related failures (1)

Matched on shared genes, mechanisms and ways of failing as well as wording. Each shows why it matched — treat these as leads rather than verdicts.

social cognitionConcrete versus abstract descriptions of belief-inconsistent behaviour
With a modified version of the Geschke et al. (2007) design, the stronger impact of concrete descriptions of belief-inconsistent behaviour would shrink or reverse.
The difference between concrete and abstract descriptions was largely absent, so the study supported neither the original finding nor the linguistic bias account.
Why it matched: same research area

Links in published research

Where this experiment's genes are known to matter outside its own research area, and the papers behind those links. Sources: Open Targets Platform and Europe PMC.