Exploring the effects of visual perspective on the ERP components of empathy for pain

ABSTRACT

Previous neurophysiological research suggests that there are event-related potential (ERP) components associated with empathy for pain: an early affective component (N2) and two late cognitive components (P3/LPP). The current study investigated whether and how the visual perspective from which a painful event is observed affects these ERP components. Participants viewed images of hands in pain vs. not in pain from a first-person or third-person perspective. We found that visual perspective influences both the early and late components. In the early component (N2), there was a larger mean amplitude during observation of pain vs no-pain exclusively when images were shown from a first-person perspective. We suggest that this effect may be driven by misattributing the on-screen hand to oneself. For the late component (P3), we found a larger effect of pain on mean amplitudes in response to third-person relative to first-person images. We speculate that the P3 may reflect a later process that enables effective recognition of others’ pain in the absence of misattribution. We discuss our results in relation to self- vs other-related processing by questioning whether these ERP components are truly indexing empathy (an other-directed process) or a simple misattribution of another’s pain as one’s own (a self-directed process).

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• pain
• ERP
• attention
• sensory misattribution

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by an NSERC-PGS held by CMG and a SSHRC Insight grant and infrastructure funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation held by SSO.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ It must be acknowledged that conceptual/definitional confusion abounds regarding what empathy actually is (e.g., Batson, 2009; Coll et al., 2017b) and there are likely to be different views about whether modulation in the ERP waveforms we consider in the current study reflect anything to do with empathy, or whether they are better described as relating to vicarious pain processing (e.g., Coll, 2018). Thus, in the current paper, we use the term empathy in a manner consistent with how other researchers have used the term, whilst acknowledging the conceptual/definitional confusion that surrounds it.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation;Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada;Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.