Emerging infectious outbreak inhibits pain empathy mediated prosocial behaviour

Abstract

The pandemic of COVID-19 sets off public psychological crises and impacts social functioning. Pre-pandemic research has shown that empathy exhaustion will happen as the mental resource wears out under long-term distress. While prosocial activities are positively linked to empathy, quantitative research on the pandemic's effect on empathy and prosocial willingness has been insufficiently examined. Prosocial behaviors are carried out during a life-threatening time to promote communication and encourage community members to survive emergencies such as food shortages and natural disasters. This study examined the shifts in emotion, empathy, and prosocial behaviors between the pre-pandemic and pandemic era in China. Before (N = 520, 11/21/2019-11/23/2019) and after (N = 570, 2/23/2020-2/24/2020) the COVID-19 pandemic, we explored an empathy-driven prosociality relationship through an online task and questionnaires with a total of 1,190 participants. Through a two-group comparison, we found a population-based decline in empathy that ultimately affected prosocial willingness. The empathic concern could positively predict prosocial willingness through the perception of the others’ pain. Over the pandemic era, however, this relationship became less salient. Moreover, a distance effect in such a situation, consistent with the ripple effect, affected the way in which short-term anxiety during the outbreak influences empathic concern. Measures are required to mitigate the adverse effects of empathy fatigue after the outbreak of COVID-19.

Far from the eyes, far from the heart: COVID-19 confinement dampened sensitivity to painful facial features

“…For all other questionnaire scores, Group differences were assessed through independent samples t -tests. In particular, the direction of the effects associated with the four empathy subscores of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) could be well predicted by the previous study from (Cao et al, 2020) which found decreased scores following the lockdown (except for the Personal Distress subscore which increased). As such, we tested “directional” effects under one-tailed significance for any of the four subscores, thus leading to a one-tailed α error = 0.0125 (corresponding to 0.05/4).…”

“…Data for only 147 (out of 160) participants were available (73 pre-lockdown and 74 post-lockdown). In particular, we ran independent sample t -tests on the four subscores of the IRI questionnaire, in the attempt to replicate the effects previously reported by Cao et al (2020). We found a significant group (pre- vs post-lockdown) difference only for the empathy concern subscale of the IRI (Davis, 1980), t (145) = 2.40, p (one-tailed) = .009, d = 0.20.…”

“…To date, only a few studies investigated the consequences of the social restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic on the processing of others’ affective facial information. For instance, Cao et al (2020) documented how Chinese individuals exhibited lesser sensitivity to videos of people reacting to electric shocks following the lockdown, an effect that was paralleled by decreased empathic scores from validated questionnaires (Davis, 1980). Instead, Meléndez et al (2020) investigated the impact of lockdown on emotional facial recognition comparing the performance of Spanish individuals before and after the confinement.…”

Personality and context‐related factors of helping and helping‐related affect during early stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…Regarding the fear related to pandemic, our analyses revealed no differences between helpers and non‐helpers. This result is contrary to the findings of previous studies which showed that fear and anxiety were usually related to less prosocial behavior (Cao et al ., 2020; Ye et al ., 2020) and it is more in line with meta‐analytic findings that showed that negative affect and anxiety are not the determimants of prosocial behavior (Thielmann et al ., 2020).…”

“…Cao, Qi, Y Huang et al . (2020) have shown that both trait and state empathy were related to prosocial willingness in the time of COVID‐19 pandemic. Interestingly, they found that the closer to the epicenter of the pandemic (the City of Wuhan) the participants were, the less they were willing to help due to increased anxiety.…”