Gender difference in empathy for pain: An electrophysiological investigation

Abstract

Our recent event-related brain potential (ERP) study disentangled the neural mechanisms of empathy for pain into an early automatic emotional sharing component and a late controlled cognitive evaluation process. The current study further investigated gender difference in the neural mechanisms underlying empathy for pain by comparing ERPs associated with empathic responses between male and female adults. Subjects were presented with pictures of hands that were in painful or neutral situations and were asked to perform a pain judgment task that required attention to the pain cues in the stimuli or to perform a counting task that withdrew their attention from the pain cues. We found that both males and females showed a short-latency empathic response that differentiated painful and neutral stimuli over the frontal lobe at 140 ms after stimulus onset and a long-latency empathic response after 380 ms over the central-parietal regions. However, females were different from males in that the long-latency empathic response showed stronger modulation by task demands and that the ERP amplitudes at 140–180 ms were correlated with subjective reports of the degree of perceived pain of others and of unpleasantness of the self. Our ERP results provide neuroscience evidence for differences in both the early and late components of empathic process between the two sexes.