Background & Aims
Empathy, a capacity to share emotional and sensory states of others with self-other distinction, plays a vital role in social interactions. Human brain imaging studies have largely focused on characterizing an individual’s responses to others’ misfortune or fortune, and have implicated the anterior insular cortex (aIC) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) in negative empathy, and the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) for positive empathy. Given self-other distinction is a critical mechanism for empathy, and social comparison – a process that we evaluate ourselves by comparing with others – leads to changes in both emotions in the self and empathy, one possibility is that social comparison plays a key role in regulating the influence of self-related emotions on empathic responses. The aim of the present study is to elucidate the neural basis underlying how an individual’s emotions influence the individual’s empathic responses, with an emphasis on the role of social comparison.
Methods
We designed a social comparison empathic task and recorded participants’ brain responses with functional MRI. In the “individual” condition, participants experienced, or watched the confederate experiencing a pain relief (PR), control (CTL), or pain exacerbation (PE) outcome that respectively provokes relatively positive, neutral, and negative emotions in the context. Participants rated how they emotionally felt for their outcome (Individual Self) or for others’ outcome (Individual Other). In the “sequential” condition, participants first experienced one of the three outcomes, subsequently watched the confederate experiencing their outcomes, and then rated their emotions for others’ outcomes (Sequential Other). The three different outcomes for self vs other were used to elicit social comparisons, and we contrasted the Sequential Other condition with the Individual Other condition to examine the influence of emotions in the self on empathic responses. We used SPM12 to analyze fMRI data.
Results
When participants’ outcome was worse than other’s outcome (i.e., an upward comparison context) in the Sequential Other condition (including self PE followed by other PR or other CTL, and self CTL followed by other PR), we found that they showed reduced positive empathic responses and even negative emotions compared to the Individual Other condition. These behavioral findings were mirrored by significant activation in the aIC, dACC. In the most extreme upward comparison context (i.e., self PE followed by other PR), the decrease in positive empathic responses was significantly correlated with the self-reported envy ratings collected after scanning, with the aIC activity covarying with envy ratings. Compared with the Individual Other condition, the strength of functional connectivity from the aIC to ventromedial PFC, an area involved in the processing of positive states of others, scaled with the reduction in positive empathic responses in this extreme upward comparison context.
Conclusions
Taken together, we demonstrate that upward social comparison is associated with negative social emotion (envy) and blunted positive empathic responses, which is related to the functional interaction between brain regions involved in processing upward social comparisons (aIC) and positive empathy (ventromedial PFC). These findings not only demonstrate how the emotional responses in the self influence empathic responses, but highlight the importance of social comparison when researchers investigate empathic responses in humans.
References
Bernhardt BC, Singer T. The neural basis of empathy. Ann Rev Neurosci 2012;35:1-23.
Boecker L, Loschelder DD, Topolinski S. How Individuals React Emotionally to Others’ (Mis)Fortunes: A Social Comparison Framework. J Pers Soc Psychol 2022;123:55
Luo Y, Eickhoff SB, Hétu S, Feng CL. Social comparison in the brain: A coordinate-based meta-analysis of functional brain imaging studies on the downward and upward comparisons. Hum Brain Mapp 2018;39:440-458.
Morelli SA, Rameson LT, Lieberman MD. The neural components of empathy: predicting daily prosocial behavior. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 2014;9:39-47.
Singer T, Seymour B, O’Doherty J, Kaube H, Dolan RJ, Frith CD. Empathy for pain involves the affective but not sensory components of pain. Science 2004;303:1157–1162.
Presenting Author
Min-Min Lin
Poster Authors
Min-Min Lin
?Sc
Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences, National Taiwan University
Lead Author
Zhilin Su
School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK
Lead Author
Ming-Tsung Tseng
MD
Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, NTU,
Lead Author
Topics
- Pain Imaging