Abstract
Empathy plays a central role in social decisions involving psychological conflict, such as whether to help another person at the cost of one’s own interests. Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, the current study explored the neural mechanisms underlying the empathic effect on the evaluation processing of outcomes in conflict-of-interest situations, in which the gain of others resulted in the performer’s loss. In the high-empathy condition, the beneficiaries were underprivileged students who were living in distress (stranger in need). In the low-empathy condition, the beneficiaries were general students without miserable information (stranger not in need). ERP results showed that the FRN was more negative-going for self no-gain than self gain, but showed reversed pattern for other’s outcome (i.e., more negative for gain than no-gain) in the low-empathy condition, indicating that participants interpreted the gain of others as the loss of themselves. However, the reversed FRN pattern was not observed in the high-empathy condition, suggesting that the neural responses to one’s own loss are buffered by empathy. In addition, the P3 valence effect was observed only in the self condition, but not in the two stranger conditions, indicating that the P3 is more sensitive to self-relevant information. Moreover, the results of subjective rating showed that more empathic concern and altruistic motivation were elicited in the high-empathy condition than in the low-empathy condition, and these scores had negative linear correlations only with the FRN, but not with the P3. These findings suggest that when outcomes following altruistic decisions involve conflict of interest, the early stage of the processing of outcome evaluation could be modulated by the empathic level.
Highlights
In our daily life, humans are sometimes required to make difficult social decisions involving benefit conflict between themselves and other social agents, such as whether they are willing to sacrifice personal benefit on behalf of a stranger’s welfare (Rilling and Sanfey, 2011)
Bonferroni-corrected post hoc test showed that participants felt happier when they getting reward for underprivileged students than general students (p < 0.001), while a similar positive feeling was found toward gaining money for themselves and for underprivileged students (p = 0.62)
The results showed that the main effect of the beneficiary was significant [F(2,26) = 6.52, p < 0.01, η2p = 0.33], indicating that the size of the feedback-related negativity (FRN) effect was different among the three beneficiary conditions
Summary
Humans are sometimes required to make difficult social decisions involving benefit conflict between themselves and other social agents, such as whether they are willing to sacrifice personal benefit on behalf of a stranger’s welfare (Rilling and Sanfey, 2011). Given that humans use positive or negative feedback to guide their behaviors (Nieuwenhuis et al, 2004; Yang et al, 2015), it is necessary to understand the Empathy Modulates Outcome Evaluation neural mechanisms underlying the processing of evaluating altruistic outcomes when self-interests are sacrificed. Previous studies using the event-related potential (ERP) have found two ERP components related to the processing of outcome evaluation: the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P3 (Schupp et al, 2000; Gehring and Willoughby, 2002; Miltner et al, 2014). In other words, when there was no conflict of interests between oneself and others, comparable neural activities of outcome evaluation were observed in both self and others’ losing situations
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