Zhuo Shiwei, Zhang Wenyun, Fan Junsong, Wu Yin, Wu Wen, Peng Weiwei
School of Psychology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.
Department of Applied Social Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.
Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2022 Jul;141:105768. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2022.105768. Epub 2022 Apr 14.
Whether or not testosterone can impair empathy remains unclear in the literature. Given that empathic responses to others' emotional experiences depend strongly upon top-down controlled mechanisms of attention, here we investigated whether the effects of testosterone administration on pain empathy could be modulated by manipulating attention. We used a double-blind, placebo-controlled within-participant design, in which either testosterone or placebo was administrated in separate sessions. Images depicting painful or nonpainful scenes were presented to induce instant empathic responses. Experiment 1 adopted the pain-judgment and hands-counting tasks to direct attention toward painful or nonpainful aspect of the images, respectively. Experiment 2 employed the pain-rating task to estimate affective and cognitive aspects of pain empathy. When discriminating nonpainful aspects of the images in the hands-counting task, accuracies were lower and empathic late positive potential responses were greater in testosterone sessions than in placebo sessions. This suggested that testosterone enhanced empathic responses to task-irrelevant pain-related features, which interfered with task performance. When providing empathic ratings to the images in the pain-rating task, empathic event-related potentials in the early stage were only observed in the testosterone session. This suggested that testosterone facilitated automatic affective reactivity to others' pain when elaborately processing empathic stimuli. Nevertheless, when discriminating painful aspects of the images in the pain-judgment task, we did not observe any significant differences between the two sessions. These results demonstrated that testosterone effects on enhancing brain reactivity to empathic stimuli were dependent upon task demands deploying attention allocation. The enhancement likely arose from the altered brain state (e.g., increased vigilance and arousal levels) after testosterone administration, as evidenced by the reduced amplitude of spontaneous α-oscillation recorded before the onset of the images. It expands our understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms that affect empathy, and highlights the role of testosterone.
睾酮是否会损害共情能力在文献中仍不明确。鉴于对他人情绪体验的共情反应强烈依赖于自上而下的注意力控制机制，我们在此研究了睾酮给药对疼痛共情的影响是否可以通过操纵注意力来调节。我们采用了双盲、安慰剂对照的被试内设计，在不同的实验环节中分别给予睾酮或安慰剂。呈现描绘疼痛或非疼痛场景的图像以诱发即时的共情反应。实验1采用疼痛判断和手部计数任务，分别将注意力导向图像的疼痛或非疼痛方面。实验2采用疼痛评分任务来评估疼痛共情的情感和认知方面。在手部计数任务中辨别图像的非疼痛方面时，与安慰剂组相比，睾酮组的准确率较低，而共情晚期正电位反应更大。这表明睾酮增强了对与任务无关的疼痛相关特征的共情反应，从而干扰了任务表现。在疼痛评分任务中对图像进行共情评分时，仅在睾酮组观察到早期的共情事件相关电位。这表明在精细加工共情刺激时，睾酮促进了对他人疼痛的自动情感反应。然而，在疼痛判断任务中辨别图像的疼痛方面时，我们未观察到两组之间有任何显著差异。这些结果表明，睾酮对增强大脑对共情刺激的反应性的影响取决于任务需求所部署的注意力分配。这种增强可能源于睾酮给药后大脑状态的改变（例如，警觉性和唤醒水平提高），图像呈现前记录的自发α振荡幅度降低证明了这一点。它扩展了我们对影响共情的神经生物学机制的理解，并突出了睾酮的作用。
