The Relationship Between Chronic Stress And Acute Stress And Empathy For Pain

The escalating pace of life and the advancing socioeconomic status have resulted in stress becoming an inescapable aspect of daily life.Consequently,an increasing number of individuals are turning their attention toward the repercussions of stress on mental and physical well-being.Stress is characterized by the disturbance of homeostasis,in response to actual or perceived threats,leading to a range of adaptive physiological and behavioral reactions.Categorization of stress can be based on its duration and occurrence,with chronic stress referring to prolonged,recurrent,or persistent stress,posing a formidable challenge for individuals to adapt to or overcome.In contrast,acute stress is characterized by brief duration but higher intensity,making it a preferred subject of study in research on stress.Stress can trigger the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal(HPA)axis and the sympathetic neuro-adrenal medulla(SAM)axis,thereby eliciting a neuroendocrine response and alterations in cardiovascular parameters.Psychologically,stress exacerbates subjective feelings of stress and engenders adverse emotional states,such as negative self-appraisal and anxiety.Empathy for pain is a multifaceted phenomenon intrinsically intertwined with human existence,epitomizing the quintessence of empathy.This empathetic response entails individuals’ perceptual,evaluative,and affective reactions to others’ pain,epitomizing a state of "feeling what another person is feeling." Contemplation or observation of others in agony tends to evoke a sense of discomfort and trigger emotional reactions,such as sympathy and compassion.Studies on empathy have primarily focused on pain as the entry point,primarily due to its indispensable role in individual survival and social interaction.Additionally,the distinctive neural mechanism of pain empathy offers an excellent avenue for comprehending the general biological underpinnings of empathy.This investigation endeavors to examine the relationship between acute and chronic stress and empathy for pain.The purpose of Study 1 was to investigate the correlation between chronic stress and empathy for pain using hair cortisol as an objective biomarker.A total of 77 healthy Chinese college students between the ages of 18 and 30 were recruited through a within-subject experimental design,comprising 41 males and 36 females,with a mean age of 20.21 ± 2.00 years.Participants’ empathy for pain was assessed based on their emotional response after viewing videos of individuals subjected to painful stimuli on their faces.Hair samples were collected from the subjects two weeks following the empathy for pain task,and cortisol levels in the hair section closest to the scalp were analyzed to gauge chronic stress levels accumulated in the month preceding the empathy task.The results demonstrated a negative correlation between hair cortisol and empathy for pain,indicating that individuals with higher levels of chronic stress exhibited lower levels of empathy for pain.The purpose of Study 2 is to investigate the relationship between acute stress response and empathy for pain using salivary cortisol as an objective biological indicator.The study further aims to explore the basis of brain functional connectivity that underlies this relationship.A total of 74 healthy Chinese college students,including33 females and 41 males aged 20.08±1.93 years,were enrolled in the experimental design.Acute stress response was induced using the Scan Stress paradigm,and saliva samples were collected at five-time points to calculate salivary cortisol concentration.Functional magnetic resonance imaging(f MRI)was used to obtain brain activity data during the acute stress experiment to explore the functional connection between the sensorimotor network(SMN)and the prominence network(SN).The study also examined the functional connection between the sub-networks and sub-brain regions of the two networks as the brain neural mechanism that mediates the effect of cortisol acute stress response on empathy for pain.After the stress task,the empathy task for pain was conducted using the same procedure as in Study 1.Empathy for pain was measured subjectively by the reported score after watching the video displaying others receiving pain stimuli.The results revealed a negative correlation between cortisol stress response and empathy scores for pain,indicating that individuals who produced more salivary cortisol during acute stress had lower subsequent empathy for pain.Furthermore,the study found that the functional connectivity between SMN and SN,including the functional connectivity between SMNa and SNa,and the functional connectivity between paracentral lobule(PCL)and the insula(INS),were negatively correlated with salivary cortisol stress response and positively correlated with empathy for pain.Among them,the functional connection between PCL and INS mediated the effect of the acute stress response of cortisol on empathy for pain.In brief,the aforementioned studies discovered an adverse correlation between objective stress indicators and empathetic response to pain from the perspectives of both chronic and acute stress.Moreover,they delved deeper into the neuroendocrine mechanism underlying the connection between acute cortisol stress response and empathy for pain,thereby making a significant contribution to the fields of social cognitive neuroscience and practical applications.Initially,drawing upon previous research regarding the association between stress and empathy,this study centers on empathy for pain,a prototypical form of empathy,and utilizes a video-based task with superior ecological validity to gauge it.This not only constitutes a distinctive contribution towards a more exhaustive comprehension of stress’ s impact on empathy but also offers an innovative framework for expounding the decline of prosocial behavior following acute stress while furnishing theoretical guidance for mitigating negative interpersonal consequences of stress.Secondly,this study not only encompasses the interplay between chronic stress levels and empathy for pain but also examines the relationship between acute stress response and empathy for pain,augmenting our understanding of stress’ s divergent effects on empathy for pain.Thirdly,the secretion of cortisol,a measurable biological indicator of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal(HPA)axis activity,was employed to scrutinize the connection between cortisol release and empathy for pain in the face of stress,thus supplying a proof for the HPA axis’ s predictive role as a pivotal stress response system.Fourth,this study probes into how changes in an individual’s endocrine and neural activity in acute stress situations impact empathy for pain,with the results lending support for the novel idea that fundamental brain regions are likewise indispensable for complex social cognition.