Abstract
Previous studies have widely reported that competition modulates an individual’s ability to empathize with pain experienced by others. What remains to be clarified, however, is how modulations in the intensity of competition might affect this type of empathy. To investigate this, we first used a Eriksen Flanker task to set different competitive intensity context (high competitive intensity, HCI; medium competitive intensity, MCI; low competitive intensity, LCI). Then we used a recognition task as a competitive task, in which we recorded event-related potentials (ERP) while participants viewed static images of body parts in painful and non-painful situations. Participants were informed that both sets of images depicted an opponent that they were required to play against in the recognition task that varied in levels of competitive intensity according to condition (HCI, MCI, and LCI). We observed an early N2 differentiation between pain and no-pain stimuli over the frontal area under MCI and LCI conditions, but this was not detected under HCI condition. Moreover, we observed a pattern of pain and no-pain differentiation for the late LPP over the frontal and centro-parietal regions under HCI, MCI, and LCI condition. As the pain empathy response is indexed by pain and no-pain differentiation, these results indicate a down-regulation of pain empathy response attributable to a high level of competition. With its very early onset, this effect appears to inhibit bottom-up processing of the ability to perceive pain experienced by an opponent. Our results provide neuroscientific evidence for a deficit in early automatic arousal in response to the pain of the opponent under the influence of high competitive intensity.
Highlights
Pain empathy has been defined as the ability to understand and experience the painful feelings of another individual through cognitive/evaluative and affective processes (Jackson et al, 2006; Decety et al, 2010; Bernhardt and Singer, 2012; Gao et al, 2017)
One-way ANOVA showed that there was no difference between the three competitive intensity groups in perspective taking (PT), FS, empathic concern (EC), and personal distress (PD) subscales [PT: F(2,42) = 0.612, p > 0.05, η2 = 0.028; PD: F(2,42) = 1.085, p > 0.05, η2 = 0.049; EC: F(2,42) = 0.200, p > 0.05, η2 = 0.009; FS: F(2,42) = 0.767, p > 0.05, η2 = 0.035]
We observed a pattern of pain and no-pain differentiation for the late LPP over the frontal and centro-parietal regions under HCI, MCI, and LCI condition
Summary
Pain empathy has been defined as the ability to understand and experience the painful feelings of another individual through cognitive/evaluative and affective processes (Jackson et al, 2006; Decety et al, 2010; Bernhardt and Singer, 2012; Gao et al, 2017). The results showed that the affective expression of the coplayer presented to the participants would induced congruent empathic responses under cooperative condition, while incongruent counter-empathetic responses occurred under competitive condition (Yamada et al, 2011) Another recent ERP study conducted by Cui et al (2016) compared brain response when participants passively viewed images depicting the hands or feet of anonymous individuals in painful and non-painful situations. Alongside but unrelated to the images, participants played a game which they were instructed to play competitively or cooperatively with a partner They found that viewing others in pain elicited significantly larger P3 amplitudes than the nonpain-related pictures, this effect was only observed within the competitive context and not within the cooperative context. This result indicated that the participants were more responsive to other’s pain in a competitive context than in a cooperative context due to the threatening atmosphere induced by competitive context
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