关键词: 共情 疼痛面孔 注意 眼动

Abstract: Pain function paradox has aroused researcher’s attention. Pain itself not only is an unpleasant emotional experience for the individuals, which signals a potential threat in the environment and urges observers to escape the source of pain, but it also signals that someone needs help. This evolutionarily primitive process of pain, such as avoidance from the threat of pain seems to conflict with the emergence of empathic concern. In our opinion, the paradox may have two reasons, one is that researchers observe it at one time point, because we only collect subject's reaction time, it’s not a very sensitive index; the other one is that researchers ignore personality variables (such as empathy), and many studies have found that it is very important for emotion and recognition. Empathy for pain is a hot topic in the field of social cognition. However, few studies investigate pain function paradox and the relationship between the observer’s empathy and the attention to the pain facial picture. Method: Current methodology does not permit assessment of continuous attentional processes, and it does not allow distinction between initial attentional allocation and subsequent maintenance of attention to stimuli, but this distinction is theoretically and clinically important. Eye-tracking technology provides an intuitive and ecologically valid method to directly examine attentional processes over time. It can help us to solve these issues. This research attempts to combine the visual dot-probe paradigm and eye movement technology to explore the relationship between the observer’s empathy and the attention to the facial pain expression. The present study uses pain facial picture and neutral facial picture as experimental material. Some researchers have found that observer pain catastrophizing thoughts and personal pain experience may affect the experimental effect, so we controlled observer pain catastrophizing thoughts and personal pain experience as possible covariates. On the basis of dot-probe paradigm, 47 participants were recruited for this experiment, we only recorded 33 undergraduates’ eye movements successfully as a direct and continuous index of attention allocation. We use interpersonal reactivity index (IRI) to divide high\low empathy group. To compare the results with previous studies, initial orienting of attention was measured as latency of first fixation; attention maintenance was measured by fixation count and total fixation duration; attention bias was measured by the difference of pain facial picture and neutral facial picture results. Result: On the attention orientation stage, observers directed their attention more quickly to pain facial picture than neutral facial pictures; On the attention maintenance stage, observers have more fixation count and longer total fixation duration to the pain facial pictures than neutral facial pictures, and the observers of high-level empathy have longer total fixation duration on pain and neutral facial pictures, sub-group analysis shows that only high-level empathy observer have more total fixation duration on pain facial picture; There is no difference in reaction time. Conclusion: Observers have pain attentional bias; on the attention maintenance stage, observers’ attention may be influenced by their empathy level.

Key words: Empathy, Pain face, Attention, Eye tracking