The Modulatory Factors And Temporal Dynamic Features Of Empathy

Empathy is an affective state stemming from apprehension of another's emotional state or condition and which is congruent with it. Empathy is a kind of important social emotional phenomenon. From the social perspective, it is generally believed that empathy, which is closely related with the moral behavior and altruism behavior, is an important dynamic mechanism of prosocial behaviors. From the individual perspective, empathy is an alternative emotional experience, which plays the important role in individuals'developing healthy personalities and emotions. So empathy is a very important emotional phenomenon in education, especially in the school education, and making a study on empathy also becomes basic research oriented by education application.We can develop studies on empathy from different perspectives, this study is based on social neuroscience perspective. There are two major problems existed in the previous research on the same aspect. The first mainly centers in the empathy for pain. Pain, instead of the true meaning of human emotions, is a sense in essence. Second, The happening of the modulation of relevant factors on empathy is unclear and the points of view of study which were lack of logic is in a mess。This study is based on the above issues, turning empathy research from the sensitive component of pain to the purely emotional component of sadness. Taking empathy for sadness for example, with the event-related potential technologies and the picture perception paradigms, it argues the modulatory factors and its temporal dynamic features of empathy systematically. The results are as follows:(1) There are differences in the early and late stages between real situation and film situation. At late stage, the influence of cognitive evaluation becomes more differential and concrete. The different levels of situational realities formed by the cognitive evaluation which is based on induction modulate the empathy and this happens in the fine controlled processing period of the late stage.(2)The differences between the real situation and the cartoon situation lay in the stagebefore300ms. The vairous levels of situational realities formed by the cognitive evaluationwhich is based on object can modulate the empathy,and it embodies in both the early andlate stages with complex manifestations. The specific characters of the early and late stagesare exactly opposite.(3)The empathy for sadness of woman happens earlier (200-300ms) than men (atfer350ms),which indicates that women are adept to feel the sorrow of others, while menare good at feeling the same thing on a rational basis.(4)Comparing with the extroversive individuals, the introversive ones are moresensitive to stimulation although it cannot be sustained. Inconsistent with the expectation,both individuals of extroversion and introversion does not show any modulation on empathyfor sadness.(5)The empathy for sadness begins to occur from200ms and grows moreobviously in the late stage. It contains a certain degree of automaticity as well ascontrollability, which indicates the flexibility of human empathy. Moreover, this charactermay also apply to other negative emotions of empathy.(6)The early emotional shairng and late cognitive evaluation of empathy are notentirely separated. The cognitive evaluation stage also has emotional responses, andcognition may influence the early stage.(7)This study proposes a new theory model about happening time of the modulation ofthe extent of cognitive automation on empathy.