Accurate empathy of romantic partners increases pain ratings but promotes recovery

Abstract

BackgroundPerceived empathy is a commonly used strategy to cope with pain and is crucial for maintaining intimacy in dyadic relationships.Materials and methodsThis study used the cold pressor test to investigate how perceived empathy and relationship type interact with the subjective perception of pain and objective measures of recovery time, using heart rate as an index. One hundred and ninety participants were recruited, including 49 friend dyads and 46 romantic partner dyads. Perceived empathy was manipulated by adopting three levels as the experimental conditions: high, accurate, and low.ResultsIn the subjective perception stage, the results showed a significant interaction of relationship type and empathy with pain reporting, indicating that romantic partners reported more pain than friends under the accurate empathy condition. There were no differences between the two groups in the high and low perceived empathy conditions. In the self-recovery stage, the results showed that romantic partners had less pain tolerance than friends in all three perceived empathy conditions. On the other hand, romantic partners recovered faster than friends under the accurate empathy condition, but not under the high and low perceived empathy conditions.ConclusionThese results suggest that perceived accurate empathy is necessary for romantic relationships when coping with pain. The findings deepen our understanding of the mechanism of perceived empathy, and the ways in which it modulates psychological and physiological responses in a social context.

Implications of perceived empathy from spouses during pregnancy for health-related quality of life among pregnant women: a cross-sectional study in Anhui, China

“…Perceived empathy is the degree to which individuals perceive others to empathize with them. To our knowledge, a single Chinese experimental study involving 194 participants demonstrated that accurately perceiving empathy from a romantic partner more effectively alleviates individual social pain and reduces individual recovery time than does perceiving empathy from a friend [19]. Despite its acknowledged importance, the influence of different dimensions of perceived spousal empathy-emotional, cognitive, and behavioural empathy-on HRQoL among pregnant women is presently unclear.…”

The dyadic interaction model of relationship quality and the impact of attachment orientation and empathy on infertile couples in China

“…Natalie's study showed that in the parents of newborn babies, the couples with high levels of empathy also had high levels of sexual and relationship satisfaction (Rosen et al, 2017). According to the result of the study of Sun et al (2018) study on how empathy and relationship type interact with pain, the pain test survey showed that romantic partners recovered faster than friends, and empathy may modulate psychological and physiological responses in romantic relationships (Sun et al, 2018). The results of Lingdan's study also verified that empathy can lead to the enhancement of earlier posterity negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP) components in brain processing signals due to pain signals received by partners; this explains the possible role of empathy in dealing with stress stimuli in marital relationships from the perspective of neurotic electrophysiology (Wu et al, 2017).…”

The Dyadic Interaction Model of Relationship Quality and the Impact of Attachment Orientation and Empathy on Infertile Couples in China

“…Natalie's study found that in the parents of newborn babies, the couples with high levels of empathy also had high levels of sexual and relationship satisfaction [24]. According to the result of the study of Sun et al [25] study on how empathy and relationship type interact with pain, the pain test survey showed that romantic partners recovered faster than friends, and empathy may modulate psychological and physiological responses in romantic relationships [25]. The results of Lingdan's study also verified that empathy can lead to the enhancement of earlier posterity negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP) components in brain processing signals due to pain signals received by partners; this explains the possible role of empathy in dealing with stress stimuli in marital relationships from the perspective of neurotic electrophysiology [26].…”