Establishing a Counter-Empathy Processing Model: Evidence from Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

Counter-empathy significantly affects people's social lives. Previous evidence indicates that the degree of counter-empathy can be either strong or weak. Strong counter-empathy easily occurs when empathizers are prejudiced against the targets of empathy (e.

Social Exclusion Down-Regulates Pain Empathy at the Late Stage of Empathic Responses: Electrophysiological Evidence.

Social exclusion has a significant impact on cognition, emotion, and behavior. Some behavioral studies investigated how social exclusion affects pain empathy. Conclusions were inconsistent, and there is a lack of clarity in identifying which component of pain empathy is more likely to be affected.

Gender differences in empathic responses to others' economic payoffs: an event-related potentials study.

Although gender differences in empathy have been well established through measuring subjective outcomes, some studies of the neural mechanisms of pain empathy have not found gender differences. This inconsistent evidence may be caused by different research methods or different paradigms. The present study adopted a different approach from the pain empathy paradigm to examine gender differences in empathic responses to others' economic payoffs using event-related potentials.

Self-Interest Induces Counter- Empathy at the Late Stage of Empathic Responses to Others' Economic Payoffs.

Previous studies have found that individuals exhibit empathic responses when others are treated unfairly. However, there remains a lack of clarity over the extent to which self-interest regulates these empathic responses, and in identifying which component of empathy is more likely to be affected. To investigate these issues, an experiment was designed based on a money distribution task with two conditions [observation condition (OC) vs.

State Anxiety Down-Regulates Empathic Responses: Electrophysiological Evidence.

State anxiety is common in our life and has a significant impact on our emotion, cognition and behavior. Previous studies demonstrate that people in a negative mood are associated with low sympathy and high personal distress. However, it is unknown how state anxiety regulates empathic responses so far.

Competitive Intensity Modulates the Pain Empathy Response: An Event-Related Potentials Study.

Previous studies have widely reported that competition modulates an individual's ability to empathize with pain experienced by others. What remains to be clarified, however, is how modulations in the intensity of competition might affect this type of empathy. To investigate this, we first used a Eriksen Flanker task to set different competitive intensity context (high competitive intensity, HCI; medium competitive intensity, MCI; low competitive intensity, LCI).

Emotion intensity modulates perspective taking in men and women: an event-related potential study.

When empathizing with another individual, one can imagine the individual's emotional states and how he or she perceives a situation. However, it is not known to what extent imagining the other differs from imagining oneself under different emotional intensity situations in both sexes. The present study investigated the regulatory effect of emotional intensity on perspective taking in men and women by event-related potentials.

Sex differences in affective response to different intensity of emotionally negative stimuli: an event-related potentials study.

Previous studies have extensively reported an advantage of females in empathy as compared with males. It remains to be clarified, however, whether these sex differences are associated with sex specific neural processes underlying empathic response to different intensity of emotional stimulus. The present study examined sex differences in empathy for suffering persons by recording event-related potentials (ERP) to different emotional intensity.

Gender differences in affective sharing and self-other distinction during empathic neural responses to others' sadness.

Self-other distinction, the separation between self and other, is a prerequisite for empathy through which individuals share another individual's feelings. Prior research suggests that females are better at recognizing and sharing others' emotions, whereas males perform better at self-other distinction. It is unclear, however, whether this superiority in the self-other distinction occurs in males throughout the experience of empathy or only at some stages of the empathic process.

Effects of different forms of verbal processing on the formation of intrusions.

This study used the trauma film paradigm to investigate different forms of posttrauma verbal processing relevant to the formation of intrusive memories. We designed 3 experiments to investigate verbal processing that could help to reduce the formation of posttraumatic intrusions. Experiments 1 and 2 looked at the effect of several forms of verbal processing, varied in emotional foci and vantage points, on the formation of posttraumatic intrusions.

A comparison of counselors and matched controls in maintaining different brain responses to the same stimuli under the self-perspective and the other-perspective.

To perceive the world from the perspective of their clients, counselors need to transpose themselves into the inner states of their clients when empathizing with them. Without a self-other distinction, the counselors may confuse their clients' experience with that of their own, which leads to personal distress and has detrimental effects on their well being. The present study recorded event-related potentials (ERP) of two groups of participants (counselors and matched controls) watching the same sets of unpleasant and neutral pictures from either the self-perspective or the other-perspective.