Abstract
Social exclusion has a significant impact on cognition, emotion, and behavior. Some behavioral studies investigated how social exclusion affects pain empathy. Conclusions were inconsistent, and there is a lack of clarity in identifying which component of pain empathy is more likely to be affected. To investigate these issues, we used a Cyberball task to manipulate feelings of social exclusion. Two groups (social exclusion and social inclusion) participated in the same pain empathy task while we recorded event-related potentials (ERP) when participants viewed static images of body parts in painful and neutral situations. The results showed early N2 differentiation between painful and neutral pictures in the central regions in both groups. The pattern at the late controlled processing stage was different. Parietal P3 amplitudes for painful pictures were significantly smaller than those for neutral pictures in the social exclusion group; they did not differ in the social inclusion group. We observed a parietal late positive potential (LPP) differentiation between painful and neutral pictures in both groups. LPP amplitudes were significantly smaller in the social exclusion group than those in the social inclusion group for painful stimuli. Our results indicate that social exclusion does not affect empathic responses during the early emotional sharing stage. However, it down-regulates empathic responses at the late cognitive controlled stage, and this modulation is attenuated gradually. The current study provides neuroscientific evidence of how social exclusion dynamically influences pain empathy.
Highlights
Empathy, the natural ability to share and understand the emotions of others while being aware of the distinction between the self and others (Decety and Jackson, 2004; Singer and Lamm, 2009; Luo et al, 2012; Coll et al, 2017), has great significance in our social life
The results showed that no differences in PT, FS, EC, PD subscales, Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) total scores and RSQ scores were found between the social exclusion group and the social inclusion group
As for the parietal P3 component, painful pictures elicited significantly smaller amplitudes than neutral pictures in the social exclusion group, whereas no event-related potentials (ERP) responses differed in the social inclusion group
Summary
The natural ability to share and understand the emotions of others while being aware of the distinction between the self and others (Decety and Jackson, 2004; Singer and Lamm, 2009; Luo et al, 2012; Coll et al, 2017), has great significance in our social life. Several studies revealed that empathy is influenced by contextual factors, such as fairness (Singer et al, 2006), social distance (Meyer et al, 2012; Wang et al, 2016), competition (Yamada et al, 2011; Luo et al, 2018a), state anxiety (Luo et al, 2018b), self-interest (Jie et al, 2019a,b), as well as social exclusion It is well-established that people have a fundamental need to belong (Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Williams, 2007). Another study adopting the same future-alone exclusion paradigm has found the intermediary role of a reduced level of empathic concern for a romantic breakup between social exclusion and a subsequent decline in prosocial behavior (Twenge et al, 2007). Another fMRI study found the opposite results by showing that watching emotional social stimuli elicited stronger brain activation related to empathy after suffering Cyberball exclusion (Beyer et al, 2014)
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