Perspective-taking influences attentional deployment towards facial expressions of pain: an eye-tracking study

Abstract

Empathetic perspective-taking (PT) may be critical in modulating attention and associated responses to another's pain. However, the differential effects of imagining oneself to be in the pain sufferer's situation ('Self-perspective') or imagining the negative impacts on the pain sufferer's experience ('Other-perspective') on attention have not been studied. The effects of observer PT (Self vs. Other) and level of facial pain expressiveness (FPE) upon attention to another person's pain was investigated. Fifty-two adults were assigned to one of three PT conditions; they were instructed to view pairs of pain expressions and neutral faces and either 1) consider their own feelings (Self-perspective), 2) consider the feelings of the person in the picture (Other-perspective), or 3) received no further instructions (Control). Eye movements provided indices of early (probability and duration of first fixation) and later (total gaze duration) attentional deployment. Pain faces were more likely to be fixated upon first. A significant first fixation duration bias towards pain was observed, which increased with increasing levels of FPE, and was higher in the Self-PT than the Control condition. The proportion of total gaze duration on pain faces was higher in both experimental conditions than the Control condition. This effect was moderated by FPE in the Self-PT condition; there was a significant increase from low to high FPE. When observers attend to another's facial display of pain, top-down influences (such as PT) and bottom-up influences (such as sufferer's FPE) interact to control deployment and maintenance of attention.

Pain-related attentional processes: A systematic review of eye-tracking research

“…Similarly, most studies have found no significant difference in first fixation durations on pain-related versus neutral stimuli in people with and without chronic pain (Liossi et al, 2014;Mahmoodi-Aghdam et al, 2017;Mazidi et al, 2019;Sharpe et al, 2017;Sun et al, 2016;Vervoort et al, 2013;Yang et al, 2012Yang et al, , 2013. Only one study found that painfree adults had longer first fixation durations on pained than neutral faces (d = 0.06) (Pilch et al, 2020). Of note, however, the samples, viewing paradigms, and stimuli adopted were similar between Pilch et al (2020) and Vervoort et al (2013), yet inconsistent results were revealed regarding this index.…”

“…After reading full-text versions of the remaining 33 papers, ten articles were excluded for the following reasons: eye-tracking technology was not involved (n = 4) (Schoth et al, 2018;Schoth, Beaney, et al, 2019;Schoth, Ma, et al, 2015;Trost et al, 2016), status as a commentary (n = 2) (Sharpe, 2014; or review article (n = 1) (Todd et al, 2015), eye-tracking was used as a manipulation check instead of an outcome measure of attention (n = 1) (Vervoort, Trost, Sütterlin, Caes, & Moors, 2014), psychometric properties of eye-tracking such as test-retest reliability were examined rather than group comparisons or correlations with pain indices (n = 1) (Skinner et al, 2018), and attention to visual stimuli was not quantified (n = 1) (Schmidt et al, 2018). In addition to the 23 relevant articles retrieved from the initial search, the updated search led to the discovery of one new article published after the initial search that also met the inclusion criteria (Pilch et al, 2020). The final review involved 24 papers.…”

“…Eight studies conducted between-stimulus comparisons of first fixation proportion within chronic pain samples, with five indicating that participants made significantly more first fixations on pain-related stimuli than neutral stimuli (d = 0.47-2.00) (Jackson et al, 2018b(Jackson et al, , 2019Liossi et al, 2014;Mahmoodi-Aghdam et al, 2017;Schoth, Godwin, et al, 2015). Five studies indicated that first fixations on pain stimuli were more common among healthy participants (d = 0.11-2.00) (Heathcote et al, 2017;Jackson et al, 2018a;Ling et al, 2019;Mahmoodi-Aghdam et al, 2017;Pilch et al, 2020). In contrast, one study based on healthy adults found a lower first fixation proportion on pained faces than neutral faces (Priebe et al, 2015), but this exception cannot be explained by differences in study characteristics.…”

“…Only one study found that painfree adults had longer first fixation durations on pained than neutral faces (d = 0.06) (Pilch et al, 2020). Of note, however, the samples, viewing paradigms, and stimuli adopted were similar between Pilch et al (2020) and Vervoort et al (2013), yet inconsistent results were revealed regarding this index.…”

I Can But I Shall Not Always Be Empathic

“…For instance, an explicit instruction to actively empathize with the target could increase the attention given to a task, accentuate the mobilization of cognitive resources, and thus improve empathic responses behaviourally (e.g., Batson, 1991; Davis et al., 1996; Drayton et al, 2018 ; Rameson et al., 2012; Sheng & Han, 2012; Sierksma et al., 2015) and cerebrally (e.g., Meffert et al., 2013). For example, an instruction encouraging empathy or perspective-taking would reduce racial bias in empathy for pain (Drwecki et al., 2011; Sheng & Han, 2012), strengthen response facilitation after pain observation (Galang & Obhi, 2019), enhance eye gaze duration for painful facial expressions (Pilch et al., 2020) and normalize the cerebral activation of psychopathic offenders while viewing video clips depicting scenarios of emotional hand interactions (Meffert et al., 2013). These results suggest that empathy is partly based on deliberate mechanisms.…”