Social and Affective Neuroscience, Department of Neurology, Universität zu Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany.
Functional Imaging Unit, Center for Diagnostic Radiology, University Medicine Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2020 Feb 6;10(1):1938. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-57711-6.
How empathically people respond to a stranger's pain or pleasure does not only depend on the situational context, individual traits and intentions, but also on interindividual factors. Here we ask whether empathic responses towards unknown others are modulated by behavioural similarity as a potential marker of genetic relatedness. Participants watched two supposed human players who were modelled as having a strong (player LP) or weak (player NLP) tendency to lead in social situations executing penalty shots in a virtual reality robot soccer game. As predicted, empathic response were modulated by shared behavioural traits: participants whose tendency to lead was more similar to player LP's tendency to lead experienced more reward, and showed stronger neural activity in reward-related brain regions, when they saw player LP score a goal, and participants whose tendency to lead was more similar to player NLP's tendency to lead showed stronger empathic responses when they saw player NLP score a goal. These findings highlight the potentially evolutionary grounded role of phenotypic similarity for neural processes underlying human social perception.
人们对陌生人的痛苦或快乐感同身受的程度不仅取决于情境背景、个体特质和意图，还取决于个体间的因素。在这里，我们想问的是，对未知他人的同理心反应是否会受到行为相似性的调节，因为行为相似性可能是遗传相关性的潜在标志。参与者观看了两名假设的人类玩家，他们在社会情境中表现出强烈的（玩家 LP）或弱的（玩家 NLP）领导倾向，在虚拟现实机器人足球游戏中执行点球。正如预测的那样，同理心反应受到共享行为特征的调节：当参与者的领导倾向与玩家 LP 的领导倾向更相似时，当他们看到玩家 LP 进球时，他们会获得更多的奖励，并在与奖励相关的大脑区域表现出更强的神经活动；而当参与者的领导倾向与玩家 NLP 的领导倾向更相似时，当他们看到玩家 NLP 进球时，他们会表现出更强的同理心反应。这些发现强调了表型相似性对人类社会感知神经过程的潜在进化基础作用。
