Taking one’s time in feeling other-race pain: an event-related potential investigation on the time-course of cross-racial empathy
- 1Department of Developmental and Social Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy and 2Centre for Cognitive and Brain Science, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
- Correspondence should be addressed to Paola Sessa, Department of Developmental and Social Psychology, University of Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131 Padova, Italy. E-mail: paola.sessa{at}unipd.it
- Received July 27, 2012.
- Accepted January 3, 2013.
Abstract
Using the event-related potential (ERP) approach, we tracked the time-course of white participants’ empathic reactions to white (own-race) and black (other-race) faces displayed in a painful condition (i.e. with a needle penetrating the skin) and in a nonpainful condition (i.e. with Q-tip touching the skin). In a 280–340 ms time-window, neural responses to the pain of own-race individuals under needle penetration conditions were amplified relative to neural responses to the pain of other-race individuals displayed under analogous conditions. This ERP reaction to pain, whose source was localized in the inferior frontal gyrus, correlated with the empathic concern ratings of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index questionnaire. In a 400–750 ms time-window, the difference between neural reactions to the pain of own-race individuals, localized in the middle frontal gyrus and other-race individuals, localized in the temporoparietal junction was reduced to nil. These findings support a functional, neural and temporal distinction between two sequential processing stages underlying empathy, namely, a race-biased stage of pain sharing/mirroring followed by a race-unbiased stage of cognitive evaluation of pain.
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