Positive and negative empathy exert different effects on the perception of neutral faces with direct and averted gaze
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Empathy, the ability to share another’s emotional state, is a hallmark of social cognition. Recent evidence suggests there are different neural correlates for sharing negative and positive emotion (so-called negative and positive empathy), but it is unknown how these two empathy types effect face perception. We tracked the time-course of when empathy impacted face perception using event-related potentials (ERPs). As perceiving direct gaze is associated with positive affect and increased emotional awareness, we also investigated the interaction between gaze direction and empathy. On each trial, a sentence eliciting positive, negative, or no empathy (e.g. “Her pet dog was saved/killed/fed yesterday afternoon.”) was presented, followed by a direct or averted gaze neutral face picture of the individual described. Participants rated how much empathy they felt, and the valence of their emotional state. Eye-tracking ensured participants read the sentences and fixated on the face eye-region. Mean ERP amplitudes were analysed in 100ms windows post-face presentation (100–800ms) in a preliminary sample (n=31). The Early Posterior Negativity (EPN), an ERP component modulated by facial expressions, was enhanced for faces viewed within the two empathy conditions relative to the neutral condition, despite all faces bearing a neutral expression. Furthermore, relative to neutral trials, positive empathy trials elicited more positive amplitudes at frontal sites from 300–600ms, while negative empathy trials elicited more positive amplitudes at centroparietal sites from 500–800ms. Finally, during the positive empathy condition only, direct gaze elicited smaller EPN amplitudes than averted gaze, and more self-reported empathy (statistical trend). Participants also reported experiencing more positive emotion after viewing direct than averted gaze, and this effect was largest in the positive empathy and neutral conditions. Those results suggest that positive and negative empathy have a distinct spatio-temporal effect on face perception and that gaze direction uniquely interacts with positive empathy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".