van Heck Casper H, Driessen Josi M A, Amato Maria, van den Berg Marnou N, Bhandari Pritha, Bilbao-Broch Laura, Farres-Casals Jordi, Hendriks Manon, Jodzio Adrian C, Luque-Ballesteros Laura, Schöchl Christina, Velasco-Angeles Laura R, Weijer Roel H A, van Rijn Clementina M, Jongsma Marijtje L A
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, Donders Center for Cognition, Radboud University NijmegenNijmegen, Netherlands.
Radboud University Medical Centre, Cognitive NeuroscienceNijmegen, Netherlands.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2017 Sep 25;11:180. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00180. eCollection 2017.
Empathy describes the ability to understand another person's feelings. Psychopathy is a disorder that is characterized by a lack of empathy. Therefore, empathy and psychopathy are interesting traits to investigate with respect to experiencing and observing pain. The present study aimed to investigate pain empathy and pain sensitivity by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) extracted from the ongoing EEG in an interactive setup. Each participant fulfilled subsequently the role of "villain" and "victim". In addition, mode of control was modulated resulting in four different conditions; passive villain, active villain, active victim and passive victim. Response-, visual- and pain ERPs were compared between the four conditions. Furthermore, the role of psychopathic traits in these outcomes was investigated. Our findings suggested that people experience more conflict when hurting someone else than hurting themselves. Furthermore, our results indicated that self-controlled pain was experienced as more painful than uncontrolled pain. People that scored high on psychopathic traits seemed to process and experience pain differently. According to the results of the current study, social context, attention and personality traits seem to modulate pain processing and the empathic response to pain in self and others. The within-subject experimental design described here provides an excellent approach to further unravel the influence of social context and personality traits on social cognition.
同理心描述的是理解他人感受的能力。心理变态是一种以缺乏同理心为特征的障碍。因此，同理心和心理变态是在体验和观察疼痛方面值得研究的有趣特质。本研究旨在通过测量在交互式设置中从持续脑电图（EEG）中提取的事件相关电位（ERP）来研究疼痛同理心和疼痛敏感性。每位参与者随后都扮演了“反派”和“受害者”的角色。此外，控制模式被调制，产生了四种不同的条件；被动反派、主动反派、主动受害者和被动受害者。比较了这四种条件下的反应、视觉和疼痛ERP。此外，还研究了心理变态特质在这些结果中的作用。我们的研究结果表明，伤害他人比伤害自己时人们会经历更多冲突。此外，我们的结果表明，自我控制的疼痛比非自我控制的疼痛更令人痛苦。在心理变态特质方面得分高的人似乎对疼痛的处理和体验有所不同。根据当前研究的结果，社会背景、注意力和人格特质似乎会调节对自己和他人疼痛的处理以及对疼痛的共情反应。这里描述的被试内实验设计为进一步揭示社会背景和人格特质对社会认知的影响提供了一种极好的方法。
