Empathy: Empathic and Antipathic Emotion Induction---A New Experimental Paradigm

Presentation Title:	Empathy: Empathic and Antipathic Emotion Induction---A New Experimental Paradigm
Abstract:	In the past few years there has been a growing interest in literature for experimental paradigms assessing empathy. In particular, attention has been drawn to the neural basis for empathy. Different research paradigms aim to show how our brain works in social situations that imply empathy feelings for another person. The discovery that the so-called pain matrix is also implied in the empathic experience of pain emphasises the fact that pain experience also has an affective dimension. This is shown by the additional activation in ACC and insula (non sensory areas) also when painful stimulus are applied to another person (Peyron et al 2000, Singer et al 2004, Christmann et al 2007). This means that there is a common neural network for self-experienced pain and the observed pain in others. Now, studies have aimed to reproduce more complex social situations, assessing also the importance of affective links between individuals. For instance, Singer et al (2004) in an fMRI study assessed the brain activity in the female part of 16 couples when a painful stimulus was applied to the partner. In another study, Singer et al (2006) show even more how the brain’s empathic responses are modulated by the affective links between individuals. Depending on how a compatriot (an actor) had been acting earlier on in the experiment, empathic brain activity varied in magnitude when the participant saw this person in pain. These results emphasize that empathy is not automatic. The objective of the present study is to present an alternative experimental design for future empathy studies. It implies the possibility of the induction of empathic and antipathic states in the participant by means only of text passages. We compare this condition with conditions implying inductions with text and picture and only picture conditions. This means that we are proposing a more simple experimental setup as compared to setups involving actors and other participating persons intervening during the experiment. It seems intuitive, that the induction of empathy/antipathy should be possible through narratives (we feel empathy for our friend even if he only tells us about his mishap, we don’t necessarily need to have seen it), but until now such experimental design has not been validated. Experimental design: In a preliminary experiment, for the stimuli selection, 70 voluntary participants picked 30 photographs from a total of 60 photographs of persons in painful situations (the 60 photographs were displayed in randomly selected pairs and the participants were asked to pick the picture that elicited most pity in each pair of photographs). The pictures selected for the final experiment were those that had been selected more often by the 70 participants (non published data). Only real photographs were used since the contextual reality of the stimuli seems important for the experience of pain-related empathy (Gu et al 2007). A part from the photograph stimuli, for the emotion induction conditions, 30 explicative texts were prepared, one for each picture. These texts depicted the action that had previously led to the painful situation in the picture. 15 texts depicted the person in pain as a good person (empathy induction) and the other 15 described the corresponding person in pain as an unfair, mean person (antipathy induction). Selection of the pictures for empathy or antipathy induction texts was randomized. For the final experiment the stimuli were arranged with a stimulus presentation programme (DirectRT) in order to be presented randomly to the participants. We divided participants into three experimental groups (20 participants in each): (1) no emotion induction (only picture), (2) bimodal empathy/antipathy induction (text and photograph) and (3) simple empathy/antipathy induction (only text, no photograph). In all conditions, participants were asked to rate the amount of pity felt towards the person in pain in a likert scale from 1 to 7. Trials were randomized. As to our hypotheses, we expected the experimental condition (type of emotion induction: (a) none, (b) bimodal and (c) simple) to influence the amount of pity expressed by the participants in a 7-point likert scale, being the empathic condition the one with the highest scores, the antipathic the lowest and the condition with no induction the one in the middle for all stimuli. Furthermore, we expect gender to determine the magnitude of the ratings. Also, we expect the magnitude of ratings to be the same in the only text and text and picture conditions (…making the picture dispensable) – and both of these conditions to be superior in magnitude to the no induction condition in either way. Additionally, we hypothesize that more familiar stimuli (for instance, target persons of same sex as the participant) will elicit different ratings from those that are unfamiliar. Future applications and adaptations of the present experimental paradigm are discussed, also emphasizing the fact that these behavioural findings (ratings on a likert scale) will need to be confirmed in neuroimaging studies in order to determine that the neural networks activated by this narrative modality of empathic experience are the same as those activated in classical empathy paradigms. Christmann, C. et al. (2007). A simoultaneous EEG-fMRI study of painful electric stimulation. Neuroimage, 15, 34(4), 1428-37. Gu, X., Han, S. (2007). Attention and reality constraints on the neural processes of empathy for pain. Neuroimage, 15, 36(1), 256-67. Peyron, R., Laurent, B., Garcia-Larea, L. (2000). Functional imaging of brain responses to pain. A review and meta-analysis. Neurophysiologie clinique = Clinical neurophysiology, 30(5), 263-88. Singer, T., Seymour, B., O'Doherty, J., Kaube, H., Dolan, R.J., Frith, C.D. (2004). Empathy involves the affective but not sensory components of pain. Science, 20, 303(5661), 1157-62. Singer, T., Seymour, B., O'Doherty, J.P., Stephan, K.E., Dolan, R.J., Frith, C.D. (2006). Empathic responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others. Nature, 26, 439(7075), 466-9.
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