The Effect Of Name Activation On Pain Empathy In Medical And Non-medical College Students

Pain empathy is a special form of empathy,which refers to an individual's perception,judgment and emotional response towards the pain of others.Pain empathy allows individuals to associate others sufferings with their own feelings quickly and automatically.Therefore,pain empathy plays a vital role in an individual's social interaction,survival and development.On the other hand,in daily life,individuals are highly sensitive to self-related information.When self-name is used as a priming stimulus,it can attract individual's attention and be brought to consciousness,stimulate the self-concept,improve the self-control,and thus facilitate the completion of the task.In addition,it is considered that medical students need to diagnose and treat patients who are suffering painfulness during internship or work.For those medical students who have experience working in hospitals,will they be numb to other's pain because they have seen so many painful scenes of others,or will it facilitate their pain empathy?The purpose of this study is to use the event-related potential(ERP)technology to explore the impact of name-priming effects on pain empathy in medical college students with hospital internship or work experience and non-medical college students.The experiment requires participants to complete the judgment of the pain stimulus as quickly and accurately as possible,and analyzes the response time,accuracy rate,pain level,and corresponding ERP components obtained by the picture judgment.The main findings have been summarized as follows:(1)Behavioral resultsThe participants responded significantly faster to the pain pictures than the non-pain pictures,and the rate of correct response to the pain pictures was significantly higher than that to the non-pain pictures,which indicating that pain empathy exists.In the self-name priming condition,participants' response time to the pictures was significantly faster than unfamiliar name priming condition,and the accuracy of judgment is also significantly higher than the unfamiliar name priming condition,which indicating that the self-name prime effect has occurred.However,the main effect of the major is not significant.There is no obvious difference in response time and accuracy in the judgment of pain or non-pain pictures among medical and non-medical college students.(2)ERP resultsERP results analyzed the waveforms in different periods to obtain N1,N2,P2,and LPP components.On N1 component,there is a significant main effect on name priming conditionand major.On P2 latency,the main effect of pain stimulus and the interaction between name priming condition and major are significant,and the main effect of name priming condition is marginal significant.On the amplitude of N2 component,there is a significant main effect on major,and a marginal significant interaction between name priming condition and pain stimulus.On the N2 latency,the interaction among name priming condition,pain stimulus and major shows a marginal significant.On LPP component,the main effect of major,name priming condition and pain stimulus are all significant,while the interaction between name priming condition and pain stimulus is also significant.