The Effect Of The Emotional Influencing Factors Of Empathy For Pain

Empathy for pain is a familiar phenomenon to us, which implies perception, judgment and affective response of another's pain. It is influenced by many physiological, psychological, and sociological factors. The emotional influencing factor also plays an important role. Anecdotal evidences and empathy theories suggest that the positive emotion may significantly facilitate observers' empathy for pain. This dissertation investigated the impacts of positive, neutral, and negative emotion toward empathy for pain and the underlying neural substrates. The dissertation included 2 studies. Study 1 was an ERP study which investigated the effects of conscious affective priming to empathy for pain. Study 1 employed the reconstructed two-choice emotional oddball task which was famous for ecological validity. Study 1 was a 3 (emotion prime:positive, neutral and negative)×2 (task:judge pain or nopain) with-in subject design. For the sake of reducing the impacts of the content of emotional pictures, Study 2 employed a unconscious affective priming design, which was a 4 (emotion prime:positive, neutral, negative and no-emotion prime)×2 (task:judge pain or nopain) with-in subject design. All subjects recruited for these studies were healthy college students from Southwest University, emotional stimulus materials were emotional images from International Affective Picture System, and target stimulus materials were collected from daily life situations. The results were as follows.(1) Conscious and unconscious positive emotion both might facilitate empathy for pain. This phenomenon reflected on subjects' reaction times and peak latencies.(2) Conscious and unconscious negative emotion might inhibit empathy for pain, but they have distinct impacts on it. Conscious negative emotion significantly increased the peak latencies of early components, whereas unconscious negative emotion decreased the correct rates.(3) Emotion had different impacts on empathy for pain and normal events. Emotion had relatively large influences on empathy for pain.