Empathic responses to others' gains and losses: an electrophysiological investigation

A growing number of studies in exploring empathic modulation have revealed the neural substrates of how social stimuli are represented in the human brain, especially the pain of others. The empathic response of observing other's gains and losses, however, remains not clearly characterized. In the current study, we carried out two experiments with a gamble task to investigate how the effects of interpersonal familiarity and self-participation work on modulating the temporal neural response towards gain and loss of a friend or a stranger using scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs). The electrophysiological data show an increased amplitude of the P300 when observing a friend's performance compared to strangers playing the game in both two experiments. But the distinction of differentiated feedback-related negativity (d-FRN) between friends and strangers was only observed when the player was not involved in the game. These results indicated that the participants exerted more motivational relevance toward their friends than strangers, but the participants' empathic response toward friends was only salient when they were not involved in the gamble directly. Therefore, both familiarity and self-engagement are factors that influence the empathy towards others, complementing the recent research on empathic modulation.