Music induced happy mood suppresses the neural responses to other’s pain: Evidences from an ERP study

Abstract

In the current study, we explored the time course of processing other’s pain under induced happy or sad moods. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded when participants observing pictures showing others in painful or non-painful situations. Mood induction procedures were applied to the participants before the picture observation task. Happy and sad moods were induced by listening to about 10 minutes of music excerpts selected from the Chinese Affective Music System (CAMS). The ERP results revealed that the induced mood can influence the early automatic components N1, P2, and N2 but not the later top-down controlled components P3 and LPP. The difference of amplitudes elicited by painful and non-painful stimuli was significantly different only in a sad mood but not in a happy mood, which indicates that comparing to a sad mood, the participants’ ability to discriminate the painful stimuli from the non-painful stimuli was weakened in a happy mood. However, this reduction of sensitivity to other’s pain in a happy mood does not necessarily reduce the tendency of prosocial behaviors. These findings offer psychophysiological evidences that people’s moods can influence their empathic response towards other’s pain.

The effect of emotional information from eyes on empathy for pain: A subliminal ERP study

“…According to the grand-averaged ERP pictures, the topographical distribution and the literature [9, 30, 52, 53], five regions of interest from the frontal (the mean amplitudes of F3, Fz and F4), frontal-central (the mean amplitudes of FC3, FCz and FC4), central (the mean amplitudes of C3, Cz and C4), central-parietal (the mean amplitudes of CP3, CPz and CP4) and parietal (the mean amplitudes of P3, Pz and P4) regions were chosen. Analyses were conducted using the peak amplitudes of N1 (100~180 ms), P2 (180~240 ms), N2 (240~300 ms) and P3 (300~430 ms) and the mean amplitude of the LPC (430~650 ms) after the onset of the painful or nonpainful pictures [9, 16, 28]. A three-way, repeated-measures ANOVA with priming type (subliminal neutral, sad, fear eye region information), target type (painful, nonpainful pictures) and regions of interest was performed.…”

“…As we know, N1 and N2 components reflect early, automatic, affective-sharing processes, people automatically share fearful emotion information rather than sad emotion information when they show empathy for pain [9]. Hence, our hypothesis was that the empathy for pain task with fearful emotion would elicit larger N1 and N2 components than the task with sad emotion.…”

“…On one hand, some researchers thought that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), superior temporal sulcus (STS), temporal poles (TP), and ventromedial cortex (VM cortex) were involved in cognitive empathy, and the amygdala, insula and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) were involved in affective empathy. On the other hand, the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), the insula and the anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC) were thought to be related to empathy for pain [9]. The aMCC and the insula were the “shared neural circuit” of empathy for pain [10].…”

Processing of Painful Pictures in Individuals With High and Low Rejection Sensitivity: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials

“…This result was in line with several empirical findings that found a pain effect in the late LPC (Cui et al., 2016; Meng et al., 2013; Weng, 2010). The late LPC pain effect indicated a person’s further assessment for painful pictures because the late LPC component was generally associated with a top-down cognitive assessment processing of visual stimuli (Cheng, Jiao, Luo, & Cui, 2017; Wang et al., 2014). We failed to observe the pain effects in the EPN, P300, and early LPC component, which was inconsistent with our hypotheses.…”

Effects of trait fear of pain on event‐related potentials during word cue presentations that signal potential pain

“…Following other published work (Cheng, Jiao, Luo, & Cui, 2017;Meng et al, 2012;Mu & Han, 2013), electrodes were clustered into five sets: frontal (F3, Fz, F4), frontal-central (FC3, FCz, FC4), central (C3, Cz, C4), central-parietal (CP3, CPz, CP4) and parietal (P3, Pz, P4) regions. Amplitude measurement windows were identified using the "collapsed localizer" approach (Luck & Gaspelin, 2017).…”