Effects Of Pain-scene Priming On The Processing Of Different Emotional Stimuli

Pain played an important role in survival,and it was very important for individuals to correctly recognize and respond to it.Current researches on empathy for pain showed that pian might induce two kinds of empathic responses: personal distress and empathic concern,which corresponded to the threat value of pain hypothesis and empathy-altruism hypothesis respectively.According to the threat value of pain hypothesis,the pain scenes would cause the individual's personal distress and avoidance tendency.In contrast,the empathy-altruism hypothesis suggests,observing others' pain would induce an individual's empathic concern and approach tendency.In this study,we combined the supraliminal/subliminal priming paradigm with different lexical judgment tasks and dot-probe task,in four lexical judgment experiments and a dot-probe experiment of eye-movement,to investigate the emotional and behavioral tendencies induced by pain scenes.In Experiment 1(Lexical decision task with subliminal priming experiment),25 college students were recruited.The participants,under subliminal pain and non-pain scenes,were asked to judge whether the following words were true or false words,namely,Lexical Decision Task(LDT).To explore the differences in responses to fear words,anger words and neutral words after the subliminal priming,so as to explore which emotion was more similar to the emotional state of the participants after the subliminal pain scene priming.The results showed participants' response to fear words was faster than anger words under pain priming condition,and there was no significant difference between fear words and anger words under no pain priming condition,which indicating that the emotion of participants in the pain scene was more similar to fear emotions.Experiment 2(Approach-distancing decision task with subliminal priming experiment)included 41 college students.The participants,under the priming of subliminal pain and non-pain scenes,were asked to understand the meaning of the following words,and to judge whether they wanted to approach or avoid the word.That was,the approach-distancing decision task(ADDT).To explore the differences in responses to fear words,anger words and positive words after subliminal priming when the participants were asked to focus on the approach?avoidance dimension,so as to explore which emotion was more closely related to the behavioral tendency of the participants after the subliminal pain scene was primed.It was found,under pain priming condition,participants' response to anger words was faster than positive words,and there was no significant difference between anger words and positive words under no pain priming condition,which indicating that pain scenes were more closely related to instantly avoidance tendency.Experiment 3(Lexical decision task with supraliminal priming experiment)included 32 college students,the procedure was consistent with Experiment 1,but with subliminal priming stimulus changed to supraliminal priming.The results showed participants responded faster to the fear words than anger and neutral words under two priming conditions.Experiment 4(Approach-distancing decision task with supraliminal priming experiment)consisted of 41 college students,the procedure was consistent with Experiment 2,except subliminal priming stimulus was changed to supraliminal priming.It was found participants' correct response rate to anger words was higher than positive words under two priming conditions.The subliminal experiments jointly proved the threat value of pain hypothesis,but did not agree with the empathic-altruistic hypothesis.The difference between LDT and ADDT results also proved the task-dependent effect have proposed in previous studies.In addition,the difference between supraliminal and subliminal emotional priming results also proved the "emotional spillover" effect of subliminal emotional priming.The results of four lexical judgment experiments suggested that,observing others' pain induced fear emotion and avoidance tendency.However,according to previous research,different top-down(e.g.,personal traits)and bottom-up(e.g.,contextual cues)factors may adjust the regulation of different empathy response.Therefore,this study conducted an eye-movement experiment,to explore the effects of individuals' level of pain fear,intensity of pain scenes and time course on individual attention bias.In Experiment 5(Attentional bias experiment),36 college students were recruited,including 18 individuals with high fear of pain(FPQ(the score of fear of pain questionnaire)>108)and 18 individuals with low fear of pain(FPQ<86),to complete the dot-probe task under subliminally high,medium and no pain scenes priming respectively.The results showed that people would pay attention to fear face more quickly under three kinds scenes priming regardless their own fear of pain.But individuals with low pain fear also paid faster attention to sadness faces under no pain priming,and they had an avoidance response to fear faces under the medium pain scenes priming.Finally,in the three kinds priming conditions,the individual with high fear of pain maintained the total attention to the fear face,and their also had maintained attention to the sadness face under medium and no pain priming.For the individual with low fear of pain,they also maintained the total attention to the fear face,and they had maintained attention to the sadness face under high and no pain priming.These results indicated that the pain scene priming would cause the fear emotion firstly,and with the increase of time,the individual with high fear of pain would produce empathic concern under the medium pain priming;the individual with low fear of pain would show empathic concern under the high pain priming.Combining the results of lexical judgment experiments and a dot-probe experiment of eye-movement,it could be found that individuals would first produce personal distress under the pain scene primed,and whether they would produce empathic concern later depended on the degree of pain scenes,individuals' trait,and time process.Future research may consider changing experiment materials,study paradigms,and instruments to further verify the TVPH and the empathy-altruism hypothesis.