Please empathize! Instructions to empathise strengthen response facilitation after pain observation

ABSTRACT

Recent research has shown that observing others in pain leads to a general facilitation of reaction times. The current study sheds further light on the relationship between pain observation and reaction time by exploring how bottom-up processes, in the form of perceived pain intensity, and top-down processes, in the form of explicit instructions to empathise, influence response facilitation after pain observation. Participants watched videos of a hand getting pierced by a needle or touched by a Q-tip. To manipulate bottom-up information, participants saw videos depicting either deep or shallow insertion of the needle. To investigate potential top-down modulation, half the participants were explicitly requested to empathise with the person in the video, while the other half were told to simply watch and attend to the video. Results from two experiments corroborate previous results showing response facilitation after pain observation. Critically, experiment 2 provides robust evidence that explicit instructions to empathise with a person in pain strengthen response facilitation. We discuss these results considering social cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology studies of empathy and pain observation.

KEYWORDS:

• Pain perception
• sensorimotor resonance
• motor system
• empathy
• reaction time
• top-down processing & bottom-up processing

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our two anonymous reviewers for providing us constructive feedback and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A simulation-based sensitivity analysis was also conducted which found that the smallest effect size that a 2 × 2 × 2 mixed design ANOVA (1 between-subjects factor and 2 within-subjects factors) three-way interaction effect (with n = 52) could find at 80% power is partial-eta = 0.14. The sensitivity analysis was conducted using: https://github.com/Lakens/ANOVA_power_simulation. G*Power, the most commonly used power analysis tool, was not used as it cannot handle the current design. We did not include Delay as a factor in the sensitivity analysis as it was not a factor of interest for this experiment (and was added specifically to better match Galang et al.’s (2017) original design, rather than because we thought it would influence the results).

2 Increasing the sample size by 4 participants does not significantly change the original sensitivity analysis conducted for the first experiment.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada grant, along with infrastructure funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, held by SSO. CMG was supported by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship.