Dispositional empathy modulates vicarious effects of dynamic pain expressions on spinal nociception, facial responses and acute pain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pain communication is thought to promote automatic vicarious self-protective responses as well as empathic concern towards others' suffering. This duality was recently highlighted in a study showing that highly empathic individuals display increased vicarious facilitation of low-level pain processing (nociceptive flexion reflex, NFR) combined with an unexpected reduced facilitation of self-pain perception (pain ratings) while viewing static pictures evoking pain in others. The present study sought to test further the moderating effects of dispositional empathy on vicarious responses induced by viewing dynamic pain expressions. Twenty-four healthy volunteers viewed 1-s videos showing different levels of pain expression before noxious electric shocks were delivered to the sural nerve. Viewing stronger pain expressions generally increased shock-pain unpleasantness ratings, the amplitude of the NFR, and facial responses (corrugator muscle) to the noxious stimulation. However, self-pain ratings (intensity and unpleasantness) increased less or were reduced following clips of pain expression in individuals scoring higher on the Empathy Quotient. These results suggest that vicarious processes facilitate low-level defensive responses, while the experience of self-pain and the associated negative affect may be partly tuned-down by higher-order empathic processes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".