Competitive Intensity Modulates the Pain Empathy Response: An Event-Related Potentials Study

Abstract

Previous studies have widely reported that competition modulates an individual’s ability to empathize with pain experienced by others. What remains to be clarified, however, is how modulations in the intensity of competition might affect this type of empathy. To investigate this, we first used a Eriksen Flanker task to set different competitive intensity context (high competitive intensity, HCI; medium competitive intensity, MCI; low competitive intensity, LCI). Then we used a recognition task as a competitive task, in which we recorded event-related potentials (ERP) while participants viewed static images of body parts in painful and non-painful situations. Participants were informed that both sets of images depicted an opponent that they were required to play against in the recognition task that varied in levels of competitive intensity according to condition (HCI, MCI, and LCI). We observed an early N2 differentiation between pain and no-pain stimuli over the frontal area under MCI and LCI conditions, but this was not detected under HCI condition. Moreover, we observed a pattern of pain and no-pain differentiation for the late LPP over the frontal and centro-parietal regions under HCI, MCI, and LCI condition. As the pain empathy response is indexed by pain and no-pain differentiation, these results indicate a down-regulation of pain empathy response attributable to a high level of competition. With its very early onset, this effect appears to inhibit bottom-up processing of the ability to perceive pain experienced by an opponent. Our results provide neuroscientific evidence for a deficit in early automatic arousal in response to the pain of the opponent under the influence of high competitive intensity.

Social Exclusion Down-Regulates Pain Empathy at the Late Stage of Empathic Responses: Electrophysiological Evidence

“…We found that at the central site, painful stimuli elicited marginally significant smaller N2 amplitudes than neutral stimuli did. This finding is consistent with what other ERP studies found (Fan and Han, 2008 ; Luo et al, 2018a ). Meanwhile, as expected, the N2 differences between pain/neutral stimuli did not differ between the two groups, which suggests that acute social pain does not influence an early empathic response toward the pain of strangers.…”

“…We adopted 60 digital color photographs similar to those used in previous ERP studies (Fan and Han, 2008 ; Luo et al, 2018a ) in the empathy task during the ERP session. The visual stimuli comprised 30 pictures showing hands in painful situations and 30 matching pictures showing hands in neutral situations.…”

“…According to the results of previous ERP studies (Fan and Han, 2008 ; Decety et al, 2010 ; Luo et al, 2018a , b ) and the inspection of the grand-average data, we chose three ERP components: N2 (220–250 ms), a later component P3 (300–400 ms), and a late component LPP (450–750 ms). Previous meta-analysis studies on pain empathy found that the effect of pain observation on the N2 component is maximal at the frontal sites and most studies chose frontal-central region as the analyzed electrodes, and the effects of pain observation on the P3 and LPP components are maximal at the centro-parietal sites (Coll, 2018a , b ).…”

“…For P3 component and LPP component, we observed the largest effect of pain observation at the parietal sites. The selection of electrodes in each region was based on previous studies (Luo et al, 2018a , b ). In sight of the results of the meta-analysis studies and the largest differences of pain observation through the inspection of the grand-average data, we included central (Cz, C3, C4) regions for N2 analysis, parietal (Pz, P3, P4) regions for P3 and LPP analysis.…”

“…Empathy gives us important information about other people and the environment, making it more possible to handle potential threat and promote prosocial behavior (Frith and Frith, 2006 ; Decety, 2010 ; Graaff et al, 2018 ). Several studies revealed that empathy is influenced by contextual factors, such as fairness (Singer et al, 2006 ), social distance (Meyer et al, 2012 ; Wang et al, 2016 ), competition (Yamada et al, 2011 ; Luo et al, 2018a ), state anxiety (Luo et al, 2018b ), self-interest (Jie et al, 2019a , b ), as well as social exclusion.…”