The Effects Of Socioeconomic Status On The Empathy For Social Exclusion

As the development of Chinese society,the Chinese living standard is going to a further improvement.However,Chinese society cause a diversion from a society of familiars to strangers.Factors such as regional difference and Resource allocation difference etc.caused a certain gap between the well-off and the poor.Since interpersonal indifference caused by gap of wealth attract more and more attention worldwide,the empathy study based on socioeconomic is of high importance.Empathy is a kind of ability to feel others' feelings and to recognize others' cognitive states,which can make individuals grasp others' emotion and needs accurately with subsequently adaptive behaviors.Empathy for social pain,which is closely associated with daily life,has become research focus of cognitive neuro area.Former brain imaging studies had revealed cognitive neuro mechanism of empathy for physiological pain,and had indicated that physiological pain is regulated by social factors,such as the social class of painful targets.However,the empathy for pain such as empathy for other's social exclusion,was gradually focused by researcher.Socioeconomic status as an important social factor,includes subjective socioeconomic status and objective socioeconomic status.Thus,this paper induces the feeling of social exclusion by chat room paradigm,adopt the method of combinational means of ERP and eye tracker,to exploring socioeconomic status of painful individuals on empathy for social pain from the aspect of neural and physiological level.The 44 participants were selected from 577 college students,who has achieved objective and subjective scales before.The results of ERP indicated that:(1)At the early stage of empathy,the low socioeconomic status has greater N1 peak value,than high socioeconomic status at parietal region(50-150 time window),the low socioeconomic status has greater P1 peak value,than high socioeconomic status at frontal region(100-200 time window),and the latency of P1 of low socioeconomic status is shorter than high socioeconomic status,the high socioeconomic status has greater N2 average amplitude when the object target was accepted,than the object target was refused at parietal and center region(200-300 time window);(2)At the late stage of cognitive process of empathy,the average amplitude of LPC of low socioeconomic status was greater than high socioeconomic status(600-800 time window).The results of eye tracker data indicate that:(1)at the condition of reject,the fixation time for the object evaluated of low socioeconomic status is longer than of high socioeconomic status;(2)the fixation counts for the object evaluated of low socioeconomic status is more than of high socioeconomic status;(3)the pupil size of low socioeconomic status at condition of accept is larger than at the condition of reject.The results ERP revealed that(1)At the early stage of empathy,there is a great difference in sensitivity of emotion stimulus(the low socioeconomic status individuals show a greater N1 peak value)and resources involvement(the low socioeconomic individuals show a greater P1 peak value),whereas there is a process of emotion suppression for pain stimulus for high socioeconomic status individuals.(the average amplitude of N2 of high socioeconomic status individuals is greater)(2)At the late stage of cognitive process of empathy,individuals with high and low socioeconomic status differ in attention selection.(the average amplitude of LPC of low socioeconomic status individuals is greater).The results of eye tracker revealed that: A gap exists between high and low socioeconomic status in emotional susceptibility,motivation level and empathic concern.To summary,this paper contends that the discrepancy of people whit high and low socioeconomic status may stem from their sensitivity of emotion stimulus and attention selection.