The Effect of Empathy on the Attentional Processing of Painful and Emotional Stimuli

Empathy is shown to affect the attentional processing of painful stimuli and emotional stimuli. However, whether the attentional effects on emotional stimuli depend on emotional valence and the nature of the relationship between the attentional effects on different stimuli are still unknown.

In the present study, 25 high-empathy (HE) participants and 25 low-empathy (LE) participants were recruited to perform dot-probe tasks on painful stimuli and emotional stimuli.

The results showed that HE individuals had weak attentional disengagement to painful pictures. More importantly, regarding emotional pictures, HE individuals showed attentional avoidance to negative emotion pictures, while LE individuals showed attentional bias to positive emotion pictures. Correlation analysis showed that the attentional bias score and attentional disengagement score were only associated with each other within the same category of stimuli (painful, positive or negative stimuli).

These results revealed that HE individuals mainly showed attentional avoidance to negative stimuli, while LE individuals mainly showed attentional bias to positive stimuli.