Evaluating the neural dynamics of affective and cognitive empathy: Insights from a within-subjects experimental...

Event-related potential (ERP) studies claim that affective and cognitive empathy differentially modulate ERPs evoked by painful stimuli such that affective empathy influences early frontocentral components (N1, N2) and cognitive empathy affects later centroparietal components (P3, LPP). However, existing studies only use one empathy task and thus tap into only one construct. We used a within-subjects design in which participants viewed body parts experiencing painful and neutral stimulation followed by faces making congruent painful and neutral expressions. Participants (N = 100) completed four different tasks in response to the stimuli, rating their own discomfort (Affective Sharing), their concern for the target (Empathic Concern), how much pain they thought the target felt (affective Perspective-Taking), and the masculinity/femininity of the target (Control). Data-driven mass univariate analyses were used to analyze all electrodes and epoch timepoints separately for the body part and face stimuli. In contrast to previous findings, affective sharing and cognitive empathy tasks did not differ during early ERP components. For body parts, the effect of pain (painful vs. neutral stimuli) elicited widespread amplitude differences between empathy and control tasks from 200-650 ms, including the N2, P3 and LPP components, with no difference between empathy tasks. For faces, effects of pain started on the N170 and were weaker and more temporally restricted for the perspective-taking task, disappearing after 420 ms while empathic concern and affective sharing tasks elicited activity until 650 ms. We discuss these results and their implications for theories of empathy, emotion, and affective priming.