Anger Expression And Fear Expression Impact On Empathy For Pain

Empathy for pain refers to individual perception of others’ pain and emotional responses. Empathy is the foundation of sympathy, it’s also an important factor which makes people form a group in the process of evolution thus preserved the species. Empathy makes it easier to understand between social members, forming a mutual relationship, and promotes altruism thus inhibits anti-social behavior. In the society which crime took place frequently today, our research to how normal people’s empathy changes when they face different expression may provide an idea to avoid being hurt, which has significance to our society.In a real aggression situation, the victim’s expression is often divided into anger or fear when they face the offender. How offend’s empathy for pain changes when they face anger or fear expression may be a critical factor to decide whether he execute a crime or not. So our experiments try to simulate this kind of psychological process, we used calm expression as a baseline group to investigate how empathy changes when subject face anger or fear expression.In the animal kingdom, anger expression often caused aggressive behavior. Some previous literatures proved that human owns the same psychological process, which anger often emerged with attack, and caused aggressive behavior, but fear expression didn’t cause it. So we supposed that compared with calm expression (baseline group), anger expression can reduce ERP amplitude of latter empathy pictures, which showed in typical ERP components such as Nl, P1, N2and LPC. Fear expression has no significant difference. Our research contains two ERP (event-related potentials) experiments. Experiment1discussed how empathy changes when subjects face anger or fear expression compared with calm face. Experiment2discussed difference of empathy for pain when subject face male anger face and female anger face based on experiment1.Experiment1was a two factors within subjects experiment which designed as3(expression:fear, anger, calm) X2(task:judge the picture whether it shows pain or not). In order to avoid probability caused problem, we balanced the probability between face expression and empathy pictures. We discussed the change of empathy for pain when subjects under different expression by investigate following classic indicators of empathy, N1, P2, N2, and LPC. Compared with baseline group (calm face), we found that anger expression can significantly reduce empathy for pain, and these influence persisted from the period of early empathy (130ms-380ms) to late empathy (400-600ms), which illustrated that anger expression affect the whole process of empathy from bottom-up to top-down. It contains early emotional empathy and late cognitive empathy, while fear expression influence only early emotional empathy and hardly late cognitive empathy.The purpose of experiment2is to discuss the differences of empathy for pain when subjects face male anger face and female anger face. Experiment2was a two factors within subjects experiment which designed as2(expression:male anger face and female anger face) X2(task:judge the picture whether it shows pain or not).We found that male anger face reduce more empathy for pain than female anger face. This difference was mainly showed in LPC amplitude at400-600ms, while early components (N1, N2) makes no significantly difference.Combined experiment1and experiment2, our research proved that anger expression can significantly reduce empathy for pain, while fear expression has no significantly difference. It states that when we confront aggressive or violate behavior, acting as pathetic can reduce the probability of being hurt than getting angry. And compared by female victim, male victim getting angry can reduce more empathy for pain of violator, thus initiate violate behavior.