The Effect Of Money Priming On Empathy For Pain:An ERP Study

Money plays a very important role in people’s daily life. On the one hand, it can meet many needs and desires of individual, improve the individual’s sense of self-confidence and strength, activate people’s feeling of self-sufficiency. On the other hand, money can also undermine the interpersonal harmony, prevent people from developing empathy, care and love. The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of money priming on empathy for pain and the brain mechanism, and further confirm whether money priming both affects the early emotional sharing and late cognitive evaluation of empathy for pain.The dissertation included two studies, investigated the impact of conscious or unconscious money and neutral priming on empathy for pain respectively. The subjects in all experiments were healthy college students. The priming materials were assessed money pictures and neutral pictures. The materials of empathy for pain were pictures showed hands in painful or neutral situation. All experiments were2(prime:money and neural)×2(target stimulus:pain and non-pain) within subjects design.In study1, first, there was a pre-experiment (behavioral experiment) to confirm the effectiveness of priming, and to verify whether the target stimulus showing200ms could be distinguished clearly. Then, a formal ERP experiment was done to explore the impact of money priming on empathy for pain. The results showed that stimuli in all conditions evoked ERP components N1, P2, N2, LPC, and the stimulus materials induced the subjects’emotional empathy and cognitive empathy process. In addition, the results in study1also showed a general trend that compared with the neutral priming, money priming hindered the early identification of the painful stimulus, but not affected the late cognitive processing.In order to prevent the contents of priming picture to interfere with the subject’s response in study1, an unconscious money priming paradigm of visual masking stimulus was used in study2. First, in an pre-experiment, through the objective threshold obtained from an forced choice task to determine the perceived threshold of the priming stimulus based on the signal detection theory. Then, a formal ERP experiment was conducted to explore the impact of unconscious money priming on empathy for pain. Similar to the results of study1, stimuli in all conditions evoked ERP components Nl, P2, N2, LPC, and the stimulus materials induced the subjects’ emotional empathy and cognitive empathy process. In addition, the results in study2showed a general trend that compared with the neutral priming, money priming hindered the early identification and the late cognitive processing of the painful stimulus.In conclusion, on the conscious and unconscious money priming condition, although there were some differences between various ERP components, the general trends were consistent. Money priming hindered individuals’ empathy for pain. But the specific inner mechanism of this impact is not yet conclusive, and still needs further exploration.