The Influence Of Individuals’ Sense Of Agency On Pain Empathy

The sense of agency refers to the subjective experience that an individual can control his own behavior and control the process of external things through his behavior.Individuals’ sense of agency is the key to self-cognition and influences individuals’ social behavior,especially in the context of moral decision-making.Pain empathy refers to the affective and cognitive responses of individuals when they see or imagine others suffering pain stimuli.These research fields are of great significance to individuals’ cognitive activities,social cognition and behaviors.There have been no experiments to explore the influence of individual’s sense of agency level on pain empathy in different situations.The former researches on pain empathy mainly focuses on the studies of physical pain empathy,while there are differences between social pain empathy and physical pain empathy.To explore the influence of individuals’ sense of agency on physical pain empathy and social pain empathy through event-related potentials(ERP)technology is helpful to understand the influence of individuals’ sense of agency and the nature of pain empathy,and to further explore the application of empathy and sense of agency in social environment in the future.The classical physical pain empathic picture stimulus paradigm was used in the study of physical pain empathy,and the improved chatroom paradigm was used for the research of social pain empathy.The two research paradigms can successfully induce pain empathy,and the changes of pain empathic components can be explored more accurately with ERP technology.Based on the intentional binding effect,using an implicit time interval estimate to measure the sense of agency.In this study,we used a2(situation: obey orders/free decision)×2(type of stimulus: pain/non-pain)withinsubject design,using pain or non-pain images as the stimulus material to induce pain empathy,to investigate the common and differences characteristics of ERP in the process of cognitive activities.The results showed that in terms of behavioral outcomes,individuals’ sense of agency affected the level of pain empathy.In the free-to-decide situation,individuals had a higher sense of agency and a higher self-reported score of physical pain empathy and social pain empathy.EEG data showed that the N2 and P3 components of physical pain empathy had greater amplitude in the affective empathy component and the cognitive empathy component.Meanwhile,the N2 component of social pain empathy had a larger amplitude under the free-to-decide condition,while the LPP component of cognitive empathy had a significant difference under the condition of situation and stimulus type,which showed that the LPP amplitude induced by social pain stimulus in the free-to-decide condition was smaller.In conclusion,the influence of individuals’ sense of agency on pain empathy was explored through experiments in different situations,and it was found that individuals’ sense of agency would affect individuals’ empathy level.Under the condition of low sense of agency,the level of pain empathy was also lower.The ERP component of affective empathy was more significant,mainly reflected in the N2 component.In terms of the ERP component induced by cognitive empathy,the P3 component induced by empathy for physical pain had a significant difference,and the P3 component showed a smaller amplitude in the condition of obedience.While the LPP component showed empathy for social pain,the LPP component showed a larger amplitude in the condition of obey-to-orders.In the situation of obey-to-orders,individuals’ sense of agency was lower,and the level of pain empathy was lower,which to some extent,explained the influence of individuals’ obeying orders on their own cognitive activities and behavior in moral decision-making.