Practice is the only way to improve qualities like love, kindness and compassion, new research shows.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, using functional magnetic resonance (MRI), found that brain circuits used to detect emotions and feelings suffered dramatic changes in subjects who had extensive experience practicing compassion meditation.

Previous research has already shown that meditation can increase mental focus and concentration and help people release negative emotions.

Sixteen subjects were placed in the fMRI and requested to either begin compassion meditation or refrain from meditation as they were exposed to negative and positive human vocalizations.

“We wanted to see how compassion meditation changes the way you perceive emotional sounds,” said Antoine Luts, a neurologists at the University of Wisconsin who conducted the research with his colleague Richard Davidson, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the same university.

The results of the experiment suggest that people can train themselves to be more compassionate just as they’d train themselves to play a musical instrument.

The subject had their brain scanned during the experiment. These scans showed significant increase in activity in the portion of the brain known as the insula (which plays a key role in emotion), when the subject were exposed to negative emotional sounds. There was less increase in activity during exposure to neutral or positive sounds.

“The insula is extremely important in detecting emotions in general and specifically in mapping bodily responses to emotion – such as heart rate and blood pressure – and making that information available to other parts of the brain,” said Davidson in a news release, according to WebMD.

Activity also increased in the part of the brain that helps process empathy and the ability to gauge the mental and emotional state of others.

The study’s findings are the more important as they could be very useful to a wide range of people with behavioral or emotional problems. Therefore, compassion meditation may be a useful tool in preventing bullying, violence, aggression and depression by altering brain activity to make people more emphatic to other people’s emotions.

The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Public Library of Science One.