A Comparative Study Of Cognitive Neural Mechanisms Of Empathy For Physical Pain And Social Pain

Empathy involves understanding and sharing the emotions of others in a social environment.It is a powerful binder in the process of interpersonal social interaction and forms the basis of social morality.Empathy for pain focuses on the individual's perception,speculation,judgment,and emotional response to the current pain state of others when they are in a state of pain.It is important for the individual to save himself and can help the individual identify the source of the pain,thereby producing the next prosocial behavior or avoiding reactions.Empathy for physical pain is a typical form of empathy for pain.It refers to a series of empathy processing performed by individuals when they are in the state of facial or limb damage.It is generally induced by pictures of other people's limb pain.This typical picture–based paradigm is also used in this study.Empathy for social pain refers to the empathy of the individual suffering social harm,such as the degeneration of the individual's social relationship or the social connection break,which is induced by social exclusion in this study.To comparison the difference in cognitive neural mechanisms underlying empathy for physical pain between empathy for social pain,previous studies have used functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI),focusing on the spatial information of the brain mechanism,and the temporal dynamics difference between these two are unknown.In the real situation,empathy responses to others is often spontaneous and immediate.Exploring the time difference of empathy can make us have a deeper understanding of the nature of empathy,contribute to the application of empathy in the field of individual development and social services.Empathy for physical pain and empathy for social pain used different paradigms.The empathy responses to diverse pain types may be derived from the different forms of stimulation used in the experiment.Therefore,in order to effectively compare the time course of empathy for physical pain and empathy for social pain,this study used 2(stimulus type: physiological vs social)× 2(pain type: pain vs no pain)experimental design,unified use of face images as induced stimuli,using the traditional empathy for physical pain's picture-based paradigm and chatroom paradigm,to study the common and distinction of event-relate potentials(ERP)responses to empathy for physical pain and empathy for social pain.The main results are as follows:1.In terms of behavioral data,physiological and social pain pictures successfully induce individual's empathy for pain.When evaluating other people's feelings and themselves' feelings,the individual scores the lowest on physical pain pictures and the reaction time is the shortest.At this time,the empathy for pain effect is the biggest.The social pain picture's score is slightly higher and the response time is the longest.Due to the influence of the pre-frontal cognitive regulation mechanism,they do not feel the negative emotions such as physical pain.The painless picture has the highest score and the individual feels the most enjoyable.The result is in line with expectations.2.In terms of ERP results,empathy for pain includes an early automated emotional resonance phase and a late controlled cognitive phase.The early stage of empathy for pain is mainly located in the frontal area.The N100,P200 and N200 component,which are responsible for early identification,automatic attention and new heterosexual assessment,are involved in the initial identification and prioritization of physiological and painful stimuli.The late stage of empathy for pain is mainly located in the frontal and parietal areas.At this stage,empathy for social pain received priority processing in the frontal area.Under the influence of cognitive reappraisal and emotional regulation mechanism,the LPP amplitude decreased and the negative emotions of the subjects were less.Empathy for physical pain is selectively captured by the parietal lobe,and the LPP amplitude is the most positive going.The late slow wave indexed,social stimulation and painless stimulation being further refined and deeply evaluated.This study have showed that there is a difference in the time course between empathy for physical pain and empathy for social pain.Empathy for physical pain is rapidly and automatically processed from the bottom-up mechanism in the early stage,and empathy for social pain is subject to top-down priority assessment and mood regulation in the late stage.For the first time,the study distinguishes two aspects of empathy for pain from the perspective of time domain,which helps to deepen the understanding of the cognitive neural mechanism of empathy for pain.