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The Empathy for Pain Stimuli System (EPSS): Development and preliminary validation
Jing Meng1,2, Yanting Li3,4, Longli Luo3,4
1Key Laboratory of Applied Psychology, Chongqing Normal University, Chongqing, China. qufumj@qq.com.
Behavior Research Methods
|March 2, 2023
Summary
Researchers developed the Empathy for Pain Stimuli System (EPSS), a comprehensive database for studying empathy towards pain. This free resource includes diverse stimuli like images, voices, and videos to advance pain empathy research.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Human-Computer Interaction
Background:
- Understanding empathy for pain is crucial for social cognition and clinical applications.
- Existing stimuli for pain empathy research are often limited in scope and diversity.
- A standardized, large-scale database is needed to facilitate robust empirical investigation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce and validate the Empathy for Pain Stimuli System (EPSS), a novel, large-scale, multi-modal database.
- To provide researchers with a comprehensive resource for studying empathy towards pain across various sensory and action-based modalities.
- To enable standardized and reproducible research on the cognitive and affective mechanisms of pain empathy.
Main Methods:
- The Empathy for Pain Stimuli System (EPSS) was constructed, comprising five sub-databases: Limb Pain Pictures (EPSS-Limb), Face Pain Pictures (EPSS-Face), Voice Pain (EPSS-Voice), Action Pain Videos (EPSS-Action_Video), and Action Pain Pictures (EPSS-Action_Picture).
- Stimuli included both painful and non-painful examples across different modalities (images, voices, videos).
- Validation involved participant ratings of pain intensity, affective valence, arousal, and dominance for each stimulus.
Main Results:
- The EPSS database offers a substantial collection of validated stimuli for pain empathy research.
- Validation data confirmed the distinctiveness of painful versus non-painful stimuli across all modalities.
- The database provides a reliable and diverse set of resources for experimental manipulation.
Conclusions:
- The Empathy for Pain Stimuli System (EPSS) represents a significant advancement in the resources available for pain empathy research.
- The multi-modal nature and extensive validation of EPSS stimuli support its utility in diverse research paradigms.
- EPSS is freely available, promoting wider accessibility and accelerating scientific discovery in the field of empathy for pain.
