Vicarious Fear Learning Depends on Empathic Appraisals and Trait Empathy

Abstract

Empathy and vicarious learning of fear are increasingly understood as separate phenomena, but the interaction between the two remains poorly understood. We investigated how social (vicarious) fear learning is affected by empathic appraisals by asking participants to either enhance or decrease their empathic responses to another individual (the demonstrator), who received electric shocks paired with a predictive conditioned stimulus. A third group of participants received no appraisal instructions and responded naturally to the demonstrator. During a later test, participants who had enhanced their empathy evinced the strongest vicarious fear learning as measured by skin conductance responses to the conditioned stimulus in the absence of the demonstrator. Moreover, this effect was augmented in observers high in trait empathy. Our results suggest that a demonstrator's expression can serve as a "social" unconditioned stimulus (US), similar to a personally experienced US in Pavlovian fear conditioning, and that learning from a social US depends on both empathic appraisals and the observers' stable traits.

Social Fear Learning: from Animal Models to Human Function

“…Based on studies in rodents showing that exposure to a frightened conspecific triggers an observer’s distress and fear, an argument has been made for the involvement of affective sharing/empathy as a critical factor in the transmission of fear information and the ensuing learning [41, 53]. This is consistent with a recent experiment in humans showing that a simple instruction manipulation that has been previously validated to enhance empathy with a target (encouraging the observer to pay close attention to a demonstrator’s discomfort during the application of “painful” electric shocks) augmented fear learning acquired through observing a demonstrator receiving electric shocks [54]. Research on empathy and pro-social behaviors in humans suggests that individuals expressing high levels of empathy learn pro-social behaviors faster [55].…”

What’s in a word? How instructions, suggestions, and social information change pain and emotion

“…Additional activations were observed in anterior insula (AI), ACC, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) (Olsson et al, 2007)—regions involved in the processing of pain, empathy, and other emotions. The authors concluded that the observation of a distressed conspecific can act like an unconditioned stimulus—especially for highly empathic individuals (Olsson et al, 2015)—, and thereby engages similar pathways as direct classical conditioning (Olsson et al, 2015; Olsson and Phelps, 2007). Conversely, both direct and vicarious fear extinction involve vmPFC-amygdala interactions (Golkar et al, 2016).…”

Physiological Synchrony Predicts Observational Threat Learning in Humans

“…In social species, like humans, knowledge about threats and dangers is often acquired through various forms of social transmission, for example through observation. Research across species has shown that observing a conspecific's -a "Demonstrator's" -threat responses to a previously neutral stimulus can cause strong and persistent threat memories in the "Observer" [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Such memories are expressed by heightened autonomic nervous system activity in the observer when later facing that stimulus alone.…”

“…For observational learning to occur, the demonstrator's reactions to the threatening stimulus must function as unconditioned stimulus for the observer. It has been hypothesized that empathic processes, enabling the sharing or understanding of affective states between demonstrator and observer, facilitate observational learning [4,10,[14][15][16][17]. Previous work has implicated trait measures of cognitive empathy in observational learning [10,18], emphasizing the role individual differences in the observer's capacity to take the perspective of the demonstrator plays in learning.…”