Effects Of Self-Related And Other-Related Social Evaluations On Empathy For Pain

Empathy is an important concept in human emotions and social life.The ability to share the emotional and cognitive states of people around us can enable individuals to respond to others’ needs,predict their behavior,and make our behavioral decisions.Empathy for pain is a typical empathy,and scholars have carried out a lot of research on it.The argument that situational factors affect the individual’s empathic response to pain has been verified.Previous studies on empathy for pain have shown that situational factors such as interpersonal relationships,cooperative or competitive environments,threat or friendly environments can affect the processing of individual’s empathy for pain,while the social evaluation factor has received little attention.Social evaluation means that an individual’s evaluation of an emotional event is affected by the evaluation and feelings of the same event by other individuals.Researchers have found that social evaluation can affect individual’s emotional experience,emotional expression,and facial recognition.Therefore,this study speculated that social evaluation may also affect the process of empathy for pain.In addition,this study also introduced the non-emotional clues of self-relevance.Self-relevance refers to the degree of relevance between stimuli and self.This study intends to explore whether there is a difference between individual’s empathy response to pain when social evaluation is related to self and when social evaluation is related to others.In view of the complexity of the processing process of empathy for pain,event-related potentials(ERPs)with high time resolution were used in this study.Specifically,two experiments were carried out in this research.Experiment 1 explored the impact of self-related social evaluation on individual’s empathy for pain.First of all,in the middle of the screen,the subjects were presented with a face picture and an evaluation sentence at the same time,and the evaluation sentence was directly below the face picture,telling subjects that the sentence they saw was what the person in the picture said about you.Then a picture of the hand was presented to the subject(including the scene where the hand was experiencing pain or non-pain).Then subjects were told that this was the hand of the person just appeared,and were asked to quickly and accurately judge whether the character was experiencing pain.At the same time,the reaction time and accuracy as well as the amplitude of EEG were recorded.The results showed that at the behavioral level,there was no significant difference in response time and accuracy under different conditions.At the electrophysiological level,during the early N1 stage of stimulus processing,the painful stimuli evoked larger N1 amplitudes than non-painful stimuli in the neutral evaluation context,while the N1 amplitudes evoked by painful stimuli and non-painful stimuli in the positive and negative evaluation contexts were not different.During the late P3 stage of stimulus processing,painful stimuli evoked larger P3 amplitudes than non-painful stimuli in the positive evaluation context,while there were no difference between the painful and non-painful stimuli in the neutral and negative evaluation contexts.During the late LPC stage of stimulus processing,painful stimuli evoked larger LPC amplitudes than non-painful stimuli in all three evaluation contexts,and the degree of empathy for pain(painful stimulus-evoked LPC amplitude minus non-painful stimuli stimulus-evoked LPC amplitude)in the positive evaluation context was the largest.The results showed that emotional evaluations(regardless of positive and negative)made by others to individuals inhibited individuals’ early empathy responses to other’s pain,while positive evaluations of individuals by others promoted individuals’ late empathy responses to other’s pain.Experiment 2 explored the impact of other-related social evaluation on individual’s empathy for pain.In experiment 2,the evaluation of the subject made by the character in the picture was changed into the evaluation made by the character in the picture to himself or herself,and the rest was the same as that in experiment 1.The results showed that at the behavioral level,the subjects’ reaction time to painful pictures was significantly less than that to non-painful pictures.At the electrophysiological level,during the early N1 stage of stimulus processing,the painful stimuli evoked larger N1 amplitudes than non-painful stimuli in the neutral evaluation context,while the N1 amplitudes evoked by painful stimuli and non-painful stimuli in the positive and negative evaluation contexts were not different.During the late P3 stage of stimulus processing,painful stimuli evoked larger P3 amplitudes than non-painful stimuli in both positive and negative evaluation contexts,while there was no difference in the P3 amplitudes evoked by pain and non-painful stimuli in neutral evaluation contexts.The degree of empathy for pain(P3 amplitude evoked by painful stimuli minus the P3 amplitude evoked by non-painful stimuli)was the largest in the negative evaluation context.During the late LPC stage of stimulus processing,painful stimuli evoked larger LPC amplitudes than non-painful stimuli in all three evaluation contexts,and the degree of empathy for pain(painful stimuli-evoked LPC amplitude minus non-painful stimuli-evoked LPC amplitude)in the negative evaluation contexts was the largest.The results showed that the emotional evaluation(regardless of positive and negative)made by others to him/herself inhibited the individual’s early empathy response to other’s pain,while the negative evaluation of himself/herself by others promoted the individual’s empathy response to other’s pain.Taken together,this study has demonstrated that social evaluation affect individuals’ empathy for pain.In the early stage of empathy for pain,whether in self-related or non-self-related conditions,emotional evaluations inhibit individual’s empathic response to others.In the late stage of empathy for pain,positive evaluations of the individual by others promote the individual’s empathic response to others,on the contrary,negative evaluations of themselves by others promote the individual’s empathic response to others.