Abstract: Many lines of evidence have shown that the empathy abilities of medical students to negative events gradually decreased throughout the medical school, which indicates that medical training could affect the medical students’ empathy. Empathy has also been showed to play an important role during journalists communicates with the respondents. However, no study has so far explored empathy on journalists. In our present study, we investigated the empathy for pain of journalists compared to non-journalists. We recruited 30 journalists (13 males Vs 17 females) and 30 non-journalists with no experience of journalist (15 males and 15 females) as controls. 20 pain-related visual pictures and 10 non-pain pictures which were selected through pretest before our formal experiment were used as the stimuli. After presentation of one of these stimuli, subjects were asked to rate the pain intensity of themselves induced by the stimulus by the 10-point Likert-type scale(0- not painful and 10-most painful). We compared the pain index(PI) which are the sum of scores of all pain pictures for each subject between journalists and non-journalists. We found that the PIs of journalists was much higher than that of non-journalists, moreover, the PI were positively related to the career time of journalists. However, the scores to non-pain stimulus did not differ significantly between journalists and non-journalists. These results indicate that journalists display much higher pain empathy compared to non-journalists. Further analysis showed that the PIs did not show significant difference when they engaged in different television programs, which means that journalist types have no significant effect on pain empathy. But journalists did report higher level of care about others during social life compared to non-journalist, which suggests that more care about others due to career training could be one of factor influencing empathy on journalists. As we know so far, we provided the first experimental evidence for the higher empathy of journalists and also explored the potential factors which affect empathy ability of journalists. Therefore, our research is helpful to enrich the achievements in this research field and make a good understanding how the career training affects the human’s empathy. In our present study, we investigated the empathy for pain of journalists compared to non-journalists. We recruited 30 journalists (13 males Vs 17 females) and 30 non-journalists with no experience of journalist (15 males and 15 females) as controls. 20 pain-related visual pictures and 10 non-pain pictures which were selected through pretest before our formal experiment were used as the stimuli. After presentation of one of these stimuli, subjects were asked to rate the pain intensity of themselves induced by the stimulus by the 10-point Likert-type scale(0- not painful and 10-most painful). We compared the pain index(PI) which are the sum of scores of all pain pictures for each subject between journalists and non-journalists. We found that the PIs of journalists was much higher than that of non-journalists, moreover, the PI were positively related to the career time of journalists. However, the scores to non-pain stimulus did not differ significantly between journalists and non-journalists. These results indicate that journalists display much higher pain empathy compared to non-journalists. Further analysis showed that the PIs did not show significant difference when they engaged in different television programs, which means that journalist types have no significant effect on pain empathy. But journalists did report higher level of care about others during social life compared to non-journalist, which suggests that more care about others due to career training could be one of factor influencing empathy on journalists. As we know so far, we provided the first experimental evidence for the higher empathy of journalists and also explored the potential factors which affect empathy ability of journalists. Therefore, our research is helpful to enrich the achievements in this research field and make a good understanding how the career training affects the human’s empathy.

Key words: Journalists Pain Empathy ability

摘要： 本研究考察了记者人群与非记者人群对疼痛共情能力的差异，探讨职业训练对人类共情能力的影响。30名记者和30名非记者为本研究被试，分别给予疼痛图片或无疼痛图片后，要求被试对其进行疼痛评定。结果发现两组被试对无疼痛图片的痛感指数没有显著差异，但记者组的痛感指数明显高于非记者组，且疼感指数与记者的从业时间呈现显著的正相关性。这些结果表明记者人群在痛感共情能力上显著升高。进一步调查研究发现相对于非记者人群，记者在与人交往过程中更为在意他人，表明这可能是导致记者共情能力升高的原因之一。本研究运用实验研究的方法首次提供了记者共情能力升高的证据，并对影响因素进行了初步探讨，将有助于丰富本领域以及职业对人类共情能力影响机制的研究。

关键词: 记者 疼痛 共情能力