The effect of emotional information from eyes on empathy for pain: A subliminal ERP study

Abstract

Facial expressions are deeply tied to empathy, which plays an important role during social communication. The eye region is effective at conveying facial expressions, especially fear and sadness emotions. Further, it was proved that subliminal stimuli could impact human behavior. This research aimed to explore the effect of subliminal sad, fearful and neutral emotions conveyed by the eye region on a viewer's empathy for pain using event-related potentials (ERP). The experiment used an emotional priming paradigm of 3 (prime: subliminal neutral, sad, fear eye region information) × 2 (target: painful, nonpainful pictures) within-subject design. Participants were told to judge whether the targets were in pain or not. Results showed that the subliminal sad eye stimulus elicited a larger P2 amplitude than the subliminal fearful eye stimulus when assessing pain. For P3 and late positive component (LPC), the amplitude elicited by the painful pictures was larger than the amplitude elicited by the nonpainful pictures. The behavioral results demonstrated that people reacted to targets depicting pain more slowly after the sad emotion priming. Moreover, the subjective ratings of Personal Distress (PD) (one of the dimensions in Chinese version of Interpersonal Reactivity Index scale) predicted the pain effect in empathic neural responses in the N1 and N2 time window. The current study showed that subliminal eye emotion affected the viewer's empathy for pain. Compared with the subliminal fearful eye stimulus, the subliminal sad eye stimulus had a greater impact on empathy for pain. The perceptual level of pain was deeper in the late controlled processing stage.

Fig 1. The procedure of the effect of subliminal emotional information from eyes on empathy for pain.

Panel A showed the target illustrated a non-painful scene. Panel B showed the target illustrated a painful scene. Participants were asked to judge whether the target was painful or not.

Fig 2. Behavioral results under six experimental conditions.

The error bars representing standard errors of the mean. The symbol of “**” means p < .01. “***” means p ≤ .001.

Fig 3. Illustration of ERP results at representative electrodes.

Fig 4. Topographical maps of P2, P3 and LPC for the painful conditions.

Left panel represented P2 peak amplitudes. Middle panel represented P3 peak amplitudes. Right panel represented LPC mean amplitudes.