Empathy For Pain In Patients With Idiopathic Epilepsy:an Event-related Potentials Study

Background Epilepsy is a common clinical syndrome caused by abnormal and excessive synchronized firing of neurons in the brain due to the loss of normal activity rhythm.Seizures not only results in physical functions disorder,but also with primary cognitive functions such as attention and memory,and higher cognitive functions such as facial emotion perception and decision-making ability.Many studies have found that the cognitive function such as attention,facial emotion perception and theory of mind are impaired in idiopathic epilepsy.Currently,there have been no Event-Related Potentials(ERP)studies investigating the empathy for pain in patients with idiopathic epilepsy.Objective This study will adopt Interpersonal Reactivity Index and empathy for pain task,combining with high temporal resolution of event-related potentials technology,from the behavioral and neural electrophysiology levels to explore empathy ability of patients with idiopathic epilepsy and the neural mechanism of cognitive processing.Hypothesized that there is an empathy disorder in epileptic patients,and the effect of empathy decreases with the shift of attention.Methods(1)The subjects were patients with idiopathic epilepsy(IEP)and matched healthy controls(HC).(2)The neuropsychological tests included Mo CA-B,the digital span test,the verbal fluency test,and the Stroop test.The empathy scale is the Chinese version of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index and empathy task is the empathy for pain.(3)The electroencephalogram of the subjects in the empathy for pain task were collected.The early stage N100 and N200 components of ERP were analyzed for effective empathy effect and the late stage P300 and LPP were analyzed for cognitive empathy effect.Results(1)The results of neuropsychological tests: the verbal fluency test-voice of idiopathic epilepsy group was lower than healthy control group.There was no significant difference in Mo CA-B,digital span test,verbal fluency test-semantic and Stroop test between the two groups.(2)The behavior results: the score of fancy in IEP was obvious lower than HC,while no obvious difference was found in empathy concern,personal distress and perspective-taking between IEP and HC.There was significant difference in respect time between pain judgment task and lateralization judgment task,but no signifcant difference in accuracy between the two groups.(3)ERP results: The amplitudes of P300 components in IEP was significantly lower than HC;In both groups,the effect of empathy for pain in pain judgment task was greater than the laterality judgment task.While there was no significant difference in the amplitude of LPP components between the two groups.There was no significant difference in N100 and N200 components between the two groups.Conclusions In summary,we found that cognitive empathy abilities of IEP were impaired and affective empathy was intact compared with HC.Meanwhile,we also found that cognitive empathy decreased with the shift of attention.