Empathizing With Others' Gain Versus Loss: Examining The Influence Of Social Hierarchy And Group Membership On The Empathic Neural Responses

Empathy refers to both the capacity to share and understand others' emotion or feeling as well as resonate affectively with their emotions. Empathy is reported to have not only short-term benefits such as enhanced social support, cooperation, and understanding but also long-term benefits such as enhanced friendship, reciprocity, and self-interest.Most of the neuroscientific investigations of empathy are essentially based onstudies examining empathy in relation to negative rather than positive events. In fact, a commonality of all proposed empathy definitions is that they do not limit the experience of empathy to negative emotions. Positive empathy is a new field of empathy research and is defined as the process and ability of understanding and vicariously sharing others'positive emotions.Recent evidence indicates that empathic responses to others are modulated by various situational and individual factors. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we carried out the two experiments with a gamble task to investigate how positive and negative empathy are modulated by social hierarchies and group membership.In experiment 1, I investigate how social hierarchies of the targets modulate people's empathy for others' gain or loss in a gamble task. The electrophysiological data show that there is an increased amplitude of the feedback related negativity (FRN) when observing the loss of inferior-status targets compared with superior-status targets playing the game, while there is no obvious FRN difference when subjects observe the gain of inferior and superior status targets playing the game. These results revealed that social hierarchies have different effects depending on the valence of empathy.Previous studies suggest that empathy ratings for in-group members have shown higher amplitude compared with ratings for out-group members. We hypothesized that enclosing superior-status individuals within one's own social group can reduce the bias by increasing empathic neural responses to superior-status individuals. Experiment 2 verified that including superior-status individuals in one's own team eliminated the empathy bias by increasing neural responses to others'loss. These results indicate that the hierarchical biases in empathy are not inevitable and that manipulations of group membership can decrease the biases.In conclusion, our results revealed that others' social hierarchies have different effects depending on the valence of empathy. Empathic neural responses to others' loss are biased toward inferior-status compared with superior-status individuals and these bias can be eliminated via manipulations of group membership,whereas others' social hierarchies do not have significant effects on empathy for others' gain.