Topic: empathy for pain

Empathy is a fundamental social-cognitive ability, allowing one to infer about the affective state of another individual and resonate with it, which is crucial for interpersonal relationships. On a neural level, this ability to empathize with others might stem from so-called ‘shared representations’, patterns of neural activation recruited both during the firsthand, as well as the empathic experience of a specific affective state. Correlational evidence for this account using fMRI repeatedly showed overlaps in brain activity for firsthand and witnessed pain. However, despite this correlational

Aims. The aim of our study was to investigate the relationship between social anxiety (SA) and empathy. Based on EEG ERP technique, we examined how socially anxious individuals process empathy for pain in relation to perspective taken. Methods. The ERP procedure involved images depicting hands in painful and neutral situations, after which participants evaluated the degree of perceived painfulness and unpleasantness of the stimuli. The study was divided into blocks, each preceding with the instruction to take first-person perspective (FPP) or third-person perspectives (TPP). Participants (N=65