The effect of empathy and context on face-processing ERPs

Abstract

The investigation of emotional face processing has largely used faces devoid of context, and does not account for within-perceiver differences in empathy. The importance of context in face perception has become apparent in recent years. This study examined the interaction of the contextual factors of facial expression, knowledge of a person's character, and withinperceiver empathy levels on face processing event-related potentials (ERPs). Forty-two adult participants learned background information about six individuals' character. Three types of character were described, in which the character was depicted as deliberately causing harm to others, accidentally causing harm to others, or undertaking neutral actions. Subsequently, EEG was recorded while participants viewed the characters' faces displaying neutral or emotional expressions. Participants' empathy was assessed using the Empathy Quotient survey. Results showed a significant interaction of character type and empathy on the early posterior negativity (EPN) ERP component. These results suggested that for those with either low or high empathy, more attention was paid to the face stimuli, with more distinction between the different characters. In contrast, those in the middle range of empathy tended to produce smaller EPN with less distinction between character types. Findings highlight the importance of trait empathy in accounting for how faces in context are perceived.

Neuronal Correlates of Empathy: A Systematic Review of Event-Related Potentials Studies in Perceptual Tasks

“…Fernandes et al [46] found that congruent and incongruent conditions regarding covered expressions from a previous scenario were associated with similar early and late LPP amplitudes in older adults, but not in younger and middle-aged adults, who presented a higher amplitude for congruent than incongruent condition. In the Facial Processing Task with different facial expressions and characterization stories [18], no effect was found for the LPP and EQ scores.…”

“…Components were quantified using mean amplitude in the selected time window in most studies (k = 19), while the rest reported peak amplitude (k = 6), peak-to-peak (k = 2), or baseline-to-peak (k = 1) amplitude. Two studies considered both peak and mean amplitude in different ERP components [18,46].…”

“…In older adults, the N170 amplitude was found to be larger for incongruent than congruent conditions for fear. In a Face Emotion processing task [18], participants were previously presented with pictures of six different actors and introduced to vignettes portraying either intentionally negative, unintentionally negative, or neutral behaviors for each face. Then, pictures of the same actors were presented, expressing different emotions, and the participant had to answer which emotion was shown.…”

“…The same study analyzed the EPN and reported larger (more negative) amplitudes for negative empathy than for neutral empathy in the right hemisphere. Finally, Clark et al [18] also explored the EPN in the face emotion processing task with characters' stories and found a significant "Character Type by Empathy" interaction. The results indicated that the EPN tends to be larger in participants with very low or very high EQ scores, for all characters-but smallest for those with empathy in the middle range.…”

“…Although ERP studies provide limited information on the spatial locus of neuronal activity, they allow the recording of brain activity with a millisecond temporal resolution [16], providing information on fast-occurring neuronal processes that are not captured using fMRI. Given the key role that empathy has in social, personal [17,18], and professional contexts [19,20], ERP studies can be a highly relevant source of evidence on the neuronal bases of empathy. Through ERP techniques, researchers can gain insights and better understand the neural networks that underlie the construct of empathy, as well as how they are modulated by various factors.…”