Meditating with One’s Avatar in Virtual Reality Enhances Self-Compassion and Perspective-Taking

Objectives Regular self-compassion practice is associated with improved mental health by fostering kindness toward one’s suffering and relying on self-related processes like perspective-taking. It is not known whether recently described self-related processes that rely on multisensory bodily signals, induced by exposing participants to an avatar and multisensory stimulation, also contribute to self-compassion meditation. We integrated virtual reality (VR)-based self-compassion meditation with multisensory stimulation promoting self-identification with the avatar. Method We designed a 17-min-long practice that integrated multisensory stimulation, and audio-guided self-compassion meditation. Twenty-six participants completed an avatar-based self-compassion condition (ASC) and a standard self-compassion condition (SSC) in a within-subject design. Pre- and post-meditation assessments included scores of the State Self-Compassion Scale, Self-Other Four Immeasurables Scale, and an Own Body Transformation task to measure self-compassion, positive and negative qualities, and perspective-taking ability, respectively. Results Participants in both ASC and SSC conditions demonstrated significantly higher self-compassion scores ( p < 0.001), increased positive qualities, and reduced negative valence (interaction effect: p < 0.001) versus baseline. Perspective-taking ability, as measured in the OBT task, improved in the ASC versus SSC condition. Conclusions This study showed that (1) incorporating VR-based multisensory stimulation with an avatar into self-compassion practice (ASC) was feasible, (2) both ASC and SSC induced higher compassion ratings characterized by decreased negative and increased positive qualities compared to the baseline, and that (3) ASC meditation improved perspective-taking more than SSC. We proposed that multisensory perceptual cues provided by VR can support perspective-taking, potentially fostering empathetic engagement towards oneself, aiding self-compassion practices. Preregistration This study is not pre-registered.