A Screening Mechanism Differentiating True from False Pain during Empathy

Ya-Bin Sun,Ning Wang,Fei Luo,Wen Ye,Xiao-Xiao Lin,Jin-Yan Wang

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-11963-x

Abstract

Empathizing with another’s suffering is important in social interactions. Empathic behavior is selectively elicited from genuine, meaningful pain but not from fake, meaningless scenarios. However, the brain’s screening mechanism of false information from meaningful events and the time course for the screening process remains unclear. Using EEG combined with principle components analysis (PCA) techniques, here we compared temporal neurodynamics between the observation of pain and no-pain pictures as well as between true (painful expressions and needle-penetrated arms) and false (needle-penetrated faces with neutral expressions) pain pictures. The results revealed that pain vs. no-pain information is differentiated in the very early ERP components, i.e., the N1/P1 for the face and arm pictures categories and the VPP/N170 for the facial expression category while the mid-latency ERP components, N2 and P3, played key roles in differentiating true from false situations. The complex of N2 and P3 components may serve as a screening mechanism through which observers allocate their attentions to more important or relevant events and screen out false environmental information. This is the first study to describe and provide a time course of the screening process during pain empathy. These findings shed new light on the understanding of empathic processing.

Highlights

The sight of an elderly woman lying in the road with bruises and a grimace on her face elicits pity which urges you to rush to her and help her up
When gender was taken into consideration, the early distinction between the needle-penetrated face and the Q-tip-touched face, and between the needle-penetrated arm and the Q-tip-touched arm were only found in females, but not in males, as revealed by the significant gender × condition × category interaction effect [F(1.97, 545.86) = 8.82, P = 0.005, ηP2 = 0.02]
The present study examined brain activity induced by empathy-eliciting painful scenes through the combination of event-related potential (ERP) and principle component analysis (PCA) techniques

Summary

Introduction

The sight of an elderly woman lying in the road with bruises and a grimace on her face elicits pity which urges you to rush to her and help her up. Fan and Han used a convinced paradigm in which they required participants to perform either a pain judgment task or a hands counting task while watching pictures or cartoons depicting hands in pain[25] They found that visual stimuli induced early and late ERP components that differentiated pain from neutral conditions. The late component, appearing over the central-parietal areas after 380 ms, was only evident when attending to pain cues (i.e., the pain judgment task), and was considered a cognitive evaluation component[25] These findings have been confirmed by subsequent research[26,27,28,29,30]. Temporospatial PCA is a promising tool to capture variance across electrode sites and time points to separate latent components that may be conflated in traditional trial-averaged waveform measures of ERPs32, 33, 36

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