How to Reduce Space Before and After Section Headings in Latex

I was working with the Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Latex templates and struggled to figure out how to reduce the space before and after section headings.

I finally found the following in the template document llncs.cls.

To adjust the spaces before and after section headings, change numbers -14 and 12 respectively.

\renewcommand\section{\@startsection{section}{1}{\z@}%
                       {-14\p@ \@plus -4\p@ \@minus -4\p@}%
                       {12\p@ \@plus 4\p@ \@minus 4\p@}%
                       {\normalfont\large\bfseries\boldmath
                        \rightskip=\z@ \@plus 8em\pretolerance=10000 }}