State Anxiety Down-Regulates Empathic Responses: Electrophysiological Evidence

Abstract

State anxiety is common in our life and has a significant impact on our emotion, cognition and behavior. Previous studies demonstrate that people in a negative mood are associated with low sympathy and high personal distress. However, it is unknown how state anxiety regulates empathic responses so far. Here, we recorded event-related brain potentials (ERP) from the experimental group who were in state anxiety and the control group when they were watching painful and neutral pictures. Participants in the experimental group and the control group were asked to do the same mental arithmetic problems. The only difference was that the experimental group had time restriction and was evaluated by the observer. The results showed that no significant N2 differentiation between painful and neutral stimuli was found in both groups. In contrast, LPP amplitudes induced by painful stimuli were significantly larger than that of neutral stimuli in the control group, but not in the experimental group. Our results indicate that state anxiety inhibit empathic responses from the early emotional sharing stage to the late cognitive evaluation stage. It provides neuroscientific evidence that one’s own emotional state will have an important impact on empathy.

A multi-institutional and cross-sectional study on empathy in Chinese medical students: differences by student cadre or not, future career preference, and father’s education status

“…As a result of intense academic competition, feelings of jealousy, distrust, and animosity have been found to be common in peer relationships [40]. Such negative emotional states can impede the development of empathy [15,42].…”

How Therapeutic Tapping Can Alter Neural Correlates of Emotional Prosody Processing in Anxiety

“…For example, angry stimuli might elicit fear, whereas fearful stimuli might elicit pity. Empathetic responses to painful pictures were associated with larger LPP amplitudes [75], suggesting that a potential feeling of pity when presenting fearful stimuli could be observable in the LPP.…”

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

“…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.…”

“…Only two relevant fMRI studies investigated neural activity but they did not study the specific field of pain empathy, and the results were contradictory (Powers et al, 2011 ; Beyer et al, 2014 ). Also, there are indications in recent event-related brain potential research that pain empathy is a dynamic process involving an early automatic affective arousal component (N1/N2) and a late controlled cognitive evaluation component (P3/LPP) (Fan and Han, 2008 ; Decety et al, 2010 ; Wang et al, 2016 ; Luo et al, 2018b ). It remains to be elucidated how acute social exclusion modulates pain empathy, and at what phase of information processing does this regulation occur.…”

“…Recent ERP studies have shown that pain empathy response is a dynamic process indexed by the differentiation between pain and no-pain. This process contains an early automatic affective sharing component (N1/N2) and a late controlled cognitive evaluation component (P3/LPP) (Fan and Han, 2008 ; Decety et al, 2010 ; Coll, 2018a ; Luo et al, 2018b ). Previous studies have found that painful stimuli elicit a more positive N2 shift relative to neutral stimuli.…”