A Study On The Influence Of Pain Empathy On The Attentional Bias Of Negative Emotions In College Students

The individual's cognition of pain empathy is often affected by negative emotions,and the stimulus with emotional color is more likely to cause attention bias.In daily life,pain empathy is a psychological phenomenon closely related to negative emotions.It refers to the perception,judgment and emotional experience caused by the observer to the pain of the observed(Danziger,Prkachin,&Willer,2006),that is,"empathy" for others' pain.Attentional bias refers to the tendency of individuals to assign more or more attention resources to threatening stimuli than to neutral stimuli.There have been a lot of studies on the influencing factors of pain empathy,but there is a lack of in-depth research on the cognitive processing,functions and effects of pain empathy.The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of pain empathy on attention bias of three different negative emotions in college students from the perspective of pain judgment.This study consists of two experiments,both using the dot-probe paradigm,with pain scene as the priming stimulus and negative emotional face as the target stimulus.Experiment 1 explored the attentional bias of three negative emotions of sadness,fear and anger compared with neutral faces under the condition of unjudgmental pain empathy priming.The results showed that under the condition of priming without judgment of pain empathy,there was a phenomenon of attentional directional acceleration and attentional resolution of sadness and anger.Experiment 2 explored the attentional bias of the three negative emotions of sadness,fear and anger compared with neutral faces under the condition of the priming of judgment of pain empathy.The results showed that there were attentional bias and attentional directional acceleration of sadness under the condition of the priming of pain empathy.Based on the results of the two experiments,it is shown that negative emotions will attract attention in priority,and the pain scene,as the priming stimulus of empathy,will promote the individual's search for the threat stimulus,and lead to the attention bias of sadness through further pain judgment.