Skin Color and Attractiveness Modulate Empathy for Pain: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Di Yang,Zuoshan Li,Yinya Zhang,Xiong Li,Jing Meng

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.780633

Di Yang, Zuoshan Li + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.780633

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Abstract

Although racial in-group bias in empathy for pain has been reported, empathic responses to others’ pain may be influenced by other characteristics besides race. To explore whether skin color and attractiveness modulate empathy for pain, we recorded 24 participants’ reactions to painful faces from racial in-group members with different skin color (fair, wheatish, or dark) and attractiveness (more or less attractive) using event-related potentials (ERPs). Results showed that, for more attractive painful faces, dark skin faces were judged as less painful and elicited smaller N2 amplitudes than fair- and wheatish-skinned faces. However, for less attractive faces, there were no significant differences among the three skin colors. Our findings suggest that empathy for pain toward racial in-group members may be influenced by skin color and attractiveness.

Highlights

Empathy refers to a complicated psychological construct that reflects the ability to understand and share others’ emotional states (Arditte Hall et al, 2018)
The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in the study

Summary

Introduction

Empathy refers to a complicated psychological construct that reflects the ability to understand and share others’ emotional states (Arditte Hall et al, 2018). When an individual observes pain or injury of others, they often perceive pain and negative experiences as their own (Levy et al, 2018). This ability is called empathy for pain (Han, 2018; Meng et al, 2019). An early ERP component (N2) over the frontal-central area of the cortex is related to affective empathy to others’ pain and positively correlates with participants’ personal negative emotional reactions (Mokhtari et al, 2020). Later ERP components [e.g., P3 and late positive complex (LPC), over the central-parietal cortex] represents cognitive empathy and has been shown to correlate with pain intensity judgment of others’ pain (Chen and Liu, 2016; Xia et al, 2016; Meng et al, 2019)

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