Effects Of Repeated Exposure On Empathy For Pain Between Doctors And Medical Students

Empathy for pain is one of the manifestations of empathy.It refers to an individual's perception,experience,and emotional response to the pain of others,that is,"empathy" for the pain of others.Due to the special nature of their profession,doctors face a lot of stressful situations every day,including wounds,illnesses and even death.The accumulated pressure makes the doctor's empathy pay a huge price.Previous studies have found that the external behavior and internal cognitive processing mechanisms of doctors' empathy for pain have changed.Especially for individuals of the same age,doctors showed lower emotional arousal and cognitive evaluation in the face of pain stimuli.In the processing of empathy for pain,the individual's professional knowledge of pain and the existing experience of pain exposure are important factors affecting empathy for pain,and this may also be an important reason for the changes in the doctor's empathy.More importantly,as medical students of the future doctors' "Reserve Army",they have shown a tendency to change their empathy ability during their vocational skills learning stage,but they have paid less attention to it.In addition,previous studies have suggested that empathy for pain can cause significant changes at the individual level due to repeated exposure to pain stimuli.With the increase in the number and frequency of pain stimuli,individuals' emotional arousal and cognitive evaluation of pain stimuli will change,and this change may also be regulated by existing knowledge and experience.It is not clear to doctors or medical students whether their existing expertise and experience in pain exposure can modulate their empathy for pain after exposure to pain stimuli.In view of this,this study will take doctors and medical students with years of internship experience as research objects to explore the differences in the time course of empathy for pain processing at different exposure stages between doctors and medical students relative to their control group.Experiment 1 used a mixed design of 2 groups(doctor group vs adult control group)× 2 stimulus types(pain picture vs non-pain picture)× 2 test stages(pre-test vs post-test).It is an EEG pre-test recording phase,a behavior pre-test recording phase,an exposure phase,an EEG post-test recording phase,and a behavior post-test recording phase.Participants passively observed the pain pictures or non-pain pictures presented during the EEG recording phase.During the behavior recording phase,they needed to evaluate the pictures that appeared.The results of Experiment 1 showed that the doctor group and the adult control group did not show significant differences in behavior evaluation.However,in terms of EEG results,it was found that the amplitude of pain stimuli in the doctor group was significantly lower than that in non-pain stimuli on the N110 component reflecting early pain perception and emotional sharing,while the control group in the adult group had the opposite,and the amplitude of pain stimuli was significantly higher than Non-pain stimuli;and the N110 amplitude of the doctor group was significantly reduced after exposure to the pain stimulus,while the adult control group did not change significantly.On the N2 component that reflects emotion sharing and emotion control,the same as the N110 component,the doctor group also showed lower arousal and faster change.Finally,in terms of the components of LPP that reflect the late evaluation of pain empathy,the amplitude of LPP evoked by painful stimuli is significantly higher than that of non-painful stimuli,and as the number of painful stimuli increases,the difference between painful stimuli and non-painful stimuli disappears.The tasks of Experiment 2 were basically the same as those of Experiment 1,but the research objects were replaced by the medical student group and the university student control group.The results of experiment two showed that the amplitude of the amplitude of pain stimulation was significantly higher than that of non-pain stimulation on the N110 component;and the latency of N110 in the pre-test phase was significantly higher than that in the post-test phase.In the N2 component,the amplitude and incubation period of the pain stimulus before the exposure of the pain stimulus are significantly higher than those of the non-pain stimulus,and this difference disappears in the post-test phase;the difference is in the LPP component,and the pain stimulus and non-Pain stimuli did not show significant differences,and the amplitude of LPP in the post-test phase was significantly higher than that of pain stimuli.In summary,the doctors' group is significantly inhibited in pain perception and emotional sharing in the early processing stage of pain empathy,and can quickly control their emotional arousal of pain stimuli and investment of attention resources after the exposure of pain stimuli;The exposure of pain stimuli gradually reduced the individual's cognitive evaluation of pain stimuli and non-pain stimuli.Compared with the control group,medical students did not show any difference in the early processing stage of pain empathy or the late evaluation processing stage.Significant differences.