Dataset Information

The Role of Social Power in Neural Responses to Others' Pain.

ABSTRACT: Recent evidence has demonstrated that empathic responses are modulated by social power. However, there is little consensus regarding how an observer's social power can shape empathic responses. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the role of social power in empathic responses. Specifically, to induce the sense of power, we asked participants to recall a past situation in which they were in a position of power (high power prime) or a situation in which they were lacking power (low power prime). Afterward, we used ERPs to record the responses when participants were viewing pictures depicting other people in painful or non-painful situations. The results revealed that larger amplitudes in the earlier P2 and the later P3 components in response to painful stimuli than to non-painful stimuli. Besides, participants primed with high power only showed larger P1 amplitudes than participants primed with low power. The present study extended previous studies by showing that social power tends to enhance the early sensory processing of both painful and non-painful stimuli, instead of directly decreasing the level of empathic responses to others' pain.

SUBMITTER: Ma X

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6804528 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The Role of Social Power in Neural Responses to Others' Pain.

Ma Xueling X Wu Kai K Zhang Entao E

Frontiers in psychology 20191015

Recent evidence has demonstrated that empathic responses are modulated by social power. However, there is little consensus regarding how an observer's social power can shape empathic responses. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the role of social power in empathic responses. Specifically, to induce the sense of power, we asked participants to recall a past situation in which they were in a position of power (high power prime) or a situation in which they were lack ...[more]

PMID: 31681112

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Project description:BackgroundMajor power theories assume that social power can play an important role in an individual's goal-related behaviors. However, the specific psychological mechanisms through which this occurs remain unclear. Some studies suggested that having power enhanced individuals' goal-related behaviors, by contrast, other studies suggested that low-power individuals were associated with a greater performance in goal-directed tasks. We were particularly interested in how social power changes individuals' goal-related behaviors during an emotional face-word Stroop task.MethodSocial power was primed by asking participants to recall a past situation in which they were in a position of power (high-power individuals), or a situation in which they were lacking power (low-power individuals). Afterward, participants were asked to complete an emotional face-word Stroop task. In the task, words representing specific emotions were written in a prominent red color across a face, and these words and facial expressions were either congruent or incongruent. The participant's task was to judge the emotion of the face while ignoring the red emotional words.ResultsOur behavioral data showed that these individuals displayed faster reaction time and better accuracy in congruent conditions, slower reaction time for fearful faces and worse accuracy for happy faces in both incongruent and congruent conditions. The event-related potential analyses showed that, compared with low-power individuals, high-power individuals showed greater P1 amplitudes when faced with emotional stimuli (both incongruent and congruent conditions), indicating that power affects individuals' attention in the early sensory processing of emotional stimuli. For the N170 component, low-power individuals showed more negative amplitudes when facing emotional stimuli, indicated that low-power individuals paid more attention to the construct information of emotional stimuli. For the N450 component, compared with congruent conditions, incongruent conditions elicited more negative amplitudes for both high- and low-power individuals. More importantly, fearful faces provoked enhanced P1 amplitudes in incongruent conditions than in congruent conditions only for low-power individuals, while, happy faces elicited larger P1 amplitudes in congruent conditions than in incongruent conditions only for high-power individuals. The findings suggested that during the initial stage of stimuli processing low-power individuals are more sensitive to negative stimuli than high-power individuals.ConclusionThese findings provided electrophysiological evidence that the differences in the emotional conflict process between high- and low-power individuals mainly lies in the early processing stages of emotional information. Furthermore, evidence from P1 and N170 showed that there was also a redistribution of attentional resources in low-power individuals.

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The Role of Social Power in Neural Responses to Others' Pain.

Publications

The Role of Social Power in Neural Responses to Others' Pain.

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