The Role Of Empathy In Social Interaction Extraction: A Second-person Perspective

People usually retrieve and share past experience or knowledge with others,which promotes the formation of collective memory shared within group members.As a fundamental ability to collaborate with others,the effect of empathy on collaborative remembering has attracted widespread interest.Evidence based on behavioral studies has speculated that during the collaborative remembering process of two or more people,the speaker's selective retrieval practice of target items could induce the listener's synchronous “covert retrieval”.Neuroscience studies at the single-brain level revealed that the listener's brain activity during listening to the speaker's selective retrieval practice was similar to that of speaker in the process of remembering.In daily life,however,remembering takes place in a real-time two-way social interaction.Therefore,this study adopted a second-person perspective,and investigated the brain mechanisms of memory retrieval in social interaction and the effect of empathy in this process.This study used the retrieval practice paradigm of two-person interaction,all the participants were randomly paired into speaker-listener dyads.The neural activities in the prefrontal cortex(PFC)and right temporal parietal junction(r TPJ)of both the speaker and the listener in each dyad were recorded simultaneously using functional near-infrared spectroscopy(f NIRS)-based hyperscanning when they performed the interactive retrieval task.Before the experiment,all the participants were asked to complete the ?the Empathy Quotient,(EQ)? scale to measure the empathy.After the final retrieval test,the accurate retrieval proportion of related items were assessed.Behavioral analysis showed that,under the retrieval practice paradigm of two-person interaction,the dyads' empathy was positively correlated with their retrieval accuracy of related items.The imaging results showed that compared to resting state,the interpersonal neural synchronization(INS)in right temporal parietal junction(r TPJ)was significantly increased during interactive retrieval practice.Combining the behavioral results with the imaging results,it was found that the increased INS in r TPJ was correlated with the empathy and the retrieval accuracy of related items respectively.Finally,such increased INS mediated the relationship between empathy and the retrieval accuracy of related items in speaker-listener dyads.To sum up,this study demonstrated that the empathy had an effect on the outcome of interactive retrieval practice,in the process of this real time two-way social interaction,the INS in r TPJ was significantly increased compared to resting state.Furthermore,such increased INS mediated the contribution of empathy to the retrieval accuracy of related items in speaker-listener dyads.These findings provide an empirical evidence from the second-person perspective for us understanding the brain mechanisms of memory retrieval in social interaction.Moreover,our findings further support that the INS as a reliable neuromarker for measuring the relationship between two interactive brains,plays an important role in the research of social interaction.