Empathy Modulates the Evaluation Processing of Altruistic Outcomes

Abstract

Empathy plays a central role in social decisions involving psychological conflict, such as whether to help another person at the cost of one’s own interests. Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, the current study explored the neural mechanisms underlying the empathic effect on the evaluation processing of outcomes in conflict-of-interest situations, in which the gain of others resulted in the performer’s loss. In the high-empathy condition, the beneficiaries were underprivileged students who were living in distress (stranger in need). In the low-empathy condition, the beneficiaries were general students without miserable information (stranger not in need). ERP results showed that the FRN was more negative-going for self no-gain than self gain, but showed reversed pattern for other’s outcome (i.e., more negative for gain than no-gain) in the low-empathy condition, indicating that participants interpreted the gain of others as the loss of themselves. However, the reversed FRN pattern was not observed in the high-empathy condition, suggesting that the neural responses to one’s own loss are buffered by empathy. In addition, the P3 valence effect was observed only in the self condition, but not in the two stranger conditions, indicating that the P3 is more sensitive to self-relevant information. Moreover, the results of subjective rating showed that more empathic concern and altruistic motivation were elicited in the high-empathy condition than in the low-empathy condition, and these scores had negative linear correlations only with the FRN, but not with the P3. These findings suggest that when outcomes following altruistic decisions involve conflict of interest, the early stage of the processing of outcome evaluation could be modulated by the empathic level.

Your losses are mine: The influence of empathic concern on evaluative processing of others’ outcomes

“…A growing number of ERP studies have begun to explore how the brain responds to outcomes related to others and found that ERP responses to others' feedback were similar to those elicited by the outcome of participants themselves (Fukushima & Hiraki, 2006Hu, Xu, & Mai, 2017;Liu, Hu, Shi, & Mai, 2018;Yu & Zhou, 2006;Zhu et al, 2018). Yu and Zhou (2006) reported that the FRN was elicited when individuals observed others' performance.…”

“…Although the processing of others' outcomes is similar to that of one's own outcomes, the valence effect of the FRN and P300 amplitude are consistently smaller for others' outcomes than for one's own outcomes. (Fukushima & Hiraki, 2006Koban, Pourtois, Bediou, & Vuilleumier, 2012;Leng & Zhou 2010;Li et al, 2010;Li, Han, Lei, Holroyd, & Li, 2011;Liu, Hu, Shi, & Mai, 2018;Marco-Pallares, Kramer, Strehl, Schroder, & Munte, 2010). Marco-Pallares et al (2010) further explored the temporal processing of outcome evaluation when participants' interests were relevant to the others' performance.…”

“…Although ERP responses to others' outcomes have been revealed in some studies, the neural mechanisms underlying the evaluative processing of others' outcomes have not been well identified. Some researchers believe that the others-ERPs are possibly associated with empathy, an ability of sharing the mental and emotional states of others (Fukushima & Hiraki, 2006Leng & Zhou, 2010;Singer, 2006;Liu, Hu, Shi, & Mai, 2018;Ma et al, 2011;Martin, Kwak, Pearson, Woldorff, & Huettel, 2016). Fukushima and Hiraki (2006) used a competitive gambling task, in which two persons alternately played a game, and one player's gain meant the other's loss.…”

Your Performance Is My Concern: A Perspective-Taking Competition Task Affects ERPs to Opponent’s Outcomes

“…Montalan et al (2012) adopted Minimal Group Paradigm (participants were randomly assigned to different groups: e.g., underestimator and overestimator group in the dot estimation task) to investigate the empathy preference, and found higher pain empathy to in-group members and lower empathy to out-group members in imagined pain empathy condition. Such brain activity of empathy has been shown to be able to predict the altruism motivation (Mathur et al, 2010; Xin et al, 2018) or costly helping (Hein et al, 2010; Preis et al, 2013). Moreover, as an interesting intergroup emotion, schadenfreude (Dasborough and Harvey, 2017) has also been found in neuroscience (Steinbeis and Singer, 2014; Vollberg and Cikara, 2018).…”

Monetary payoffs modulate reciprocity expectations in outcome evaluations: An event‐related potential study

“…The dFRN data were analyzed in a 2 (Trials type: trials involving monetary payoffs vs. non‐monetary payoffs) × 2 (Participant's decision: cooperation vs. aggression) repeated measures ANOVA. According to previous studies (Liu et al., 2018; Lu et al., 2020), we regarded the absolute value of dFRN as the index measuring the FRN difference. The main effect of the Trials type was significant [ F (1, 29) = 5.46, p = .027, ƞ p 2 = 0.16], suggesting that the dFRN was stronger in the monetary trials ( M = −2.55 μV, SD = 3.42 μV) than in the non‐monetary trials ( M = −1.08 μV, SD = 2.46 μV).…”