The Influence Of Empathy On Attention Bias And Sustained Attention

Empathy is the ability of an individual to have the ability to understand the feelings and to imagine the situation of others,emotions,and thoughts of the others,and to be able to respond appropriately to the situation of the others.Empathy is closely related to human life,not only plays a vital role in interpersonal communication,but also an ability necessary in social activities.In previous studies,it was found that the groups of high and low empathy had differences in attention bios,but there are still inconsistencies in the previous studies,which are worth further exploration.Sustained attention is another dimension that is parallel with selective attention(attention bias)in attention,and sustained attention is relative to selective attention,but there is a big difference in selective attention.Are there differences between the high and low empathy groups in their sustained attention? Therefore,these studies explore the impact of empathy on attention bias and the impact of empathy on sustained attention.In addition,deeply and systematically explores the differences in attention bias and sustained attention of groups with high and low empathy ability.Revealing the nature of empathy provides evidence of another perspective.In Study 1,the dot probe task was used to explore the influence of empathy on attention bias.The results shown that there was a significant difference between the attention bias of the high empathy subjects and the low empathy subjects;High-empathy subjects are alert to both happiness and sadness,and there are significant differences with low-empathy subjects;High-empathy subjects will pay attention to happiness and sadness,and there are significant differences with lowempathy subjects.This shows that high-empathy subjects can more quickly notice negative emotions.Such as sadness,and it is difficult to separate attention from emotions.Study 2 used the Flanker paradigm to explore the effects of empathy on sustained attention.The results showed that there was a significant difference in sustained attention among high and low empathy subjects.Further research by the Two choice response RT task revealed that there was a significant difference in the ability to pay attention to high and low empathy subjects.It shows that high-empathy subjects have better sustained attention than low-empathy subjects,and will maintain more attention in the current task.From what has been discussed above,high-empathy subjects are more advantageous than low-empathy subjects in terms of selective attention(attention bias)or sustained attention.This provides empirical evidence for further exploration of the relationship between empathy and attention and provides further experimental evidence for exploring the nature of empathy.