The Effect Of Intimate Relationships On Pain Empathy In Women

Empathy is a process in which one understands and shares the emotions of others.Empathy for pain refers to "feel others’ pain"(Meng et al.,2010),which is a typical kind of empathy.Empathy for pain is beneficial for enhancing prosocial behavior and promoting interpersonal relationships.It has been proved that many factors affect empathy for pain,which can be summarized into three types: the pain factor,the observer factor,and the relationship between the pain and the observer(Meng et al.,2010).This study starts from the relationship between the pain and the observer,and selects one of the intimate relationships between the pain and the observer.Intimate relationship refers to the closeness of social relations between people.Previous studies have confirmed that different degree of self-other overlap will affect empathy for pain.This study specifically studies the intimate relationship between the pain and the observer,and explores the influence of different intimate relationships on women’s empathy for pain from three kinds of intimate relationships: lover,father and stranger.This study consisted of two experiments to investigate the effects of different intimate relationships on empathy for pain.Experiment 1 employs a 2(prime type: lover,stranger)× 2(target type: painful pictures,non-painful pictures)within-subject design,through the behavior data of different relationship to study the effect on the empathy for pain,found under painful pictures,reaction times to stranger prime condition longer than the lover prime condition;from the perspective of pain level,the main effects of target type and prime type were significant.The pain rating of the lovers prime condition was higher than that of the strangers prime condition in both painful and non-painful pictures.Experiment 2 explores the effect of different intimate relationships on empathy for pain using event-related potentials.It employs a 3(prime type:lover,stranger,father)× 2(target type: painful pictures,non-painful pictures)× 2(task type:implicit task,explicit task)within-subject design.Participants engaged in two separate tasks:(1)implicit task: judging whether a bladed tool(knife or scissors)appeared in the pictures;(2)explicit task: judging whether the pictures caused them to feel pain.The results showed that painful pictures elicited a larger N2 under the lover prime and father prime conditions compared to the stranger prime condition.For P3 and 400-500 ms,the amplitudes elicited by painful pictures under the stranger prime condition were larger than those under the father prime condition.These findings demonstrate that intimacy affected both the early and late stage of empathy for pain.Combining the two experiments,the closer the pain to the observer,the more likely the female participants were to experience empathy for pain.