Pain Empathy Modulated By Facial Attractiveness

Recently, the neural basis of pain empathy draws the public’s attention. There are numbers of research on the factors that influence pain empathy, whereas few have focused on how facial attractiveness affacts pain empathy, which was benefit for constructing the cognitive and neural mechanism of empathy. Our present study is to investigate the influence by three different tools.Using simple pain rating task, judging the pain intensity, experiment1verify whether facial attractiveness have influenced in pain empathy. There were three independence variables which were attractiveness (face with high attractiveness, face with average attractiveness, face with low attractiveness and clock with average attractiveness), pain intensity (pain, nopain) and duration (200ms,500ms) in our experiment. Our results found that with regard to face stimuli, the higher level of attractiveness the stimulus is, the lower rating they get. Meanwhile, the trend keeps stable regardless of duration.In experiment2, ERP technique was used to investigate the electrophysiological effects of facial attractiveness on pain empathy. Our results demonstrated that for N1component, there was significant difference among three levels of attactiveness, which indicated that the modulation took place in the eariler emotional sharing stage and reflected the bottom-up processing mechanism. What’s more, no significant difference of later P250-350components also indicated that the later cognitive evluation have no obvious effects.Experiment3adopted fMRI technique to explore the neural effects of facial attractiveness on pain empathy. The results found that the superior frontal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus were significant activations in the main effect of attractiveness. Meanwhile, the ROI analysis showed that ACC and Insula activations were the greatest in face with low attractiveness condition and SMA actived great in high attractiveness condition. Moreover, there were strongly activations in STG among three conditions. All these brain regions belonged to affective component of pain matrix. Therefore, the effect of facial attraciveness on pain empathy was mainly on affective component rather than sensory component of pain matrix.In summary, facial attractiveness had a profound effect on pain empathy. As the facial attractiveness decreased, the pain intensity enhanced. The neural basis of attractiveness effect on pain empathy mainly focused on the earlier emotional sharing stage and affective component of pain matrix.