Pain Empathy's Effect On Attention To Negative Emotions

Empathy for pain is about understanding,sharing and reacting for other's pain.Empathy for pain included the top-down cognitive process and bottom-up emotional process.The emotional process is about automatic sharing process which is closely associated with many negative emotion.A lot of studies have explored the influencing factors of empathy or empathy for pain,but there is a lack of in-depth research and discussion on the role of empathy or empathy for pain and its influence.The main purpose of this research was to explore which kind of negative emotions are more closely related to empathy for pain,so as to better understand the impact of the survivor's emotion on the observer after viewing various disasters in real life.Therefore,this result could provide theoretical support for promoting the accuracy of empathy and pro-social behavior.This study included two studies.The study 1 combined priming paradigm and dot-probe paradigm and it explored the participants' attention bias of sad,angry and fear emotional faces compared with neutral faces after painful and neutral scenery priming.The results of study 1 showed that individuals had attention bias towards fear faces,and the acceleration score of attention orientation for fear faces reached a significant level under the priming of painful scenery.Meanwhile,individuals had difficulty in disengaging attention from sad facial emotion.On the basis of study 1,the priming conditions of study 2 further distinguished as high-pain scene priming and low-pain scene priming,and presented two negative emotions(sadness-anger,fear-sadness,fear-anger)to the subjects at the same time.Study 2 found that after the priming of the high pain scene,subjects had attention bias towards fear when they were presented with sadness-fear faces.Meanwhile,subjects also had attention bias towards fear face when they were presented with fear-anger faces.Hence,fear was more closely related to empathy for pain.