Self-other distinction, the separation between self and other, is a prerequisite for empathy through which individuals share another individual's feelings. Prior research suggests that females are better at recognizing and sharing others' emotions, whereas males perform better at self-other distinction. It is unclear, however, whether this superiority in the self-other distinction occurs in males throughout the experience of empathy or only at some stages of the empathic process. The present study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate this issue. In two separate experimental tasks, subjects were instructed to either judge the emotions shown on a face (other-task) or evaluate their own affective responses to the emotions shown on a face (self-task). The results of the other-task revealed that unlike males, females displayed increased P2 (190-240 ms) amplitudes to sad expressions compared with neutral expressions. This finding might be associated with an improved ability to recognize and share the emotions of others in females. In contrast, only males exhibited larger P2 amplitudes to sad expressions compared with neutral expressions during the self-task. This awareness of one's own emotions in response to another individual might reflect a distinction between the self and the other at an early stage in males. At the late cognitive controlled stage, gender differences became weak. However, the emotion effects in each task for both genders were positively correlated with self-reported cognitive empathy, which was indexed by the perspective taking (PT) and fantasy (FS) subscale, but not with affective empathy.

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State anxiety is common in our life and has a significant impact on our emotion, cognition and behavior. Previous studies demonstrate that people in a negative mood are associated with low sympathy and high personal distress. However, it is unknown how state anxiety regulates empathic responses so far. Here, we recorded event-related brain potentials (ERP) from the experimental group who were in state anxiety and the control group when they were watching painful and neutral pictures. Participants in the experimental group and the control group were asked to do the same mental arithmetic problems. The only difference was that the experimental group had time restriction and was evaluated by the observer. The results showed that no significant N2 differentiation between painful and neutral stimuli was found in both groups. In contrast, LPP amplitudes induced by painful stimuli were significantly larger than that of neutral stimuli in the control group, but not in the experimental group. Our results indicate that state anxiety inhibit empathic responses from the early emotional sharing stage to the late cognitive evaluation stage. It provides neuroscientific evidence that one’s own emotional state will have an important impact on empathy.

Previous studies have found that individuals exhibit empathic responses when others are treated unfairly. However, there remains a lack of clarity over the extent to which self-interest regulates these empathic responses, and in identifying which component of empathy is more likely to be affected. To investigate these issues, an experiment was designed based on a money distribution task with two conditions [observation condition (OC) vs. participation condition (PC)], and carried out using scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs). Behavioral data showed that the participants’ empathic responses were consistent with their coplayers’ emotional expressions in the OC, whereas they were inconsistent with the coplayers’ expressions in the PC. The electrophysiological data showed that the neural encoding of facial expressions (reflected in the N170) was not affected by self-interest. However, the late stage of empathic responses (LPP) showed a decline when participants’ self-interest was involved. Disadvantageous inequality and relatively fair distribution to others elicited a more pronounced feedback-related negativity (FRN) than advantageous inequality distribution in both the OC and PC. As the late stage of empathic responses is also indexed by the LPP amplitude, these results indicate that the participants were more concerned for their own outcomes than for others’ benefits when self-interest was involved, which reduced their empathy toward their coplayers at the late stage of empathic responses.