Effects Of Distance And Distance On Pain Empathy

Empathy for pain is a common psychological phenomenon in daily life,it refers to the process of the observer's perception,judgment and emotional response to the pain of others “empathy”.Empathy for pain is affected by many factors,among which the socio-emotional relationship between the observer and the painful person plays an important role in the empathy response.From the perspective of embodied cognition,different physical distances between individuals will activate different interpersonal communication processing modes,and closer distances will often activate more intimate social and emotional relationships.Therefore,this dissertation examines the effect of the distance on empathy for pain based on the perspective of embodied cognition,and further explores the neural mechanisms that affect pain empathy.The dissertation had two experiments,using behavioral experiments and ERP experiments to explore the effect of distance on empathy for pain.The empathy for pain material used in the experiment was the life scene pictures related to hand movements,including pairs of pain and non-pain pictures.Different levels of distance were manipulated by changing the size of hands and tools in the image,and the image size was consistent.Before the formal experiment,the validity of perceptual distance manipulation was verified by sample matching task.Experiment 1 was a behavioral study,47 college students were selected as the subjects,using 2(distance: far,close)× 2(picture type: pain picture,non-pain picture)within-subjects design,through the empathy judgment task to investigate the influence of the distance of the observer on the level of empathy for pain.There were 47 college students participating in Experiment 1,including 20 boys and 27 girls.The results showed that the response of subjects to the stimulation of close-distance pain was significantly faster than that to the stimulation of far-distance pain.Experiment 2 was an ERP study,21 college students were selected as the subjects,using 2(distance: far,close)× 2(picture type: pain picture,non-pain picture)within-subjects design,to explore the neural mechanism of the influence of distance on empathy for pain.The results showed that the stimulation of close-distance pain induced more negative N1 amplitude and more positive N2 amplitude in the early stage,and more positive P3 and LPC amplitude in the later stage.The conclusions of this dissertation are as follows:(1)The distance of the observer affects empathy for pain.The stimulation of close distance can enhance the empathy degree of the subjects,showing the difference of behavioral response.(2)In the neural mechanism of the influence of distance on empathy for pain,the stimulation of close distance can induce stronger empathy response,which is manifested in the enhancement of automatic emotional sharing in the early stage of empathy and conscious cognitive evaluation in the late stage.