A Screening Mechanism Differentiating True from False Pain during Empathy

Empathizing with another’s suffering is important in social interactions. Empathic behavior is selectively elicited from genuine, meaningful pain but not from fake, meaningless scenarios. However, the brain’s screening mechanism of false information from meaningful events and the time course for the screening process remains unclear. Using EEG combined with principle components analysis (PCA) techniques, here we compared temporal neurodynamics between the observation of pain and no-pain pictures as well as between true (painful expressions and needle-penetrated arms) and false (needle-penetrated faces with neutral expressions) pain pictures. The results revealed that pain vs. no-pain information is differentiated in the very early ERP components, i.e., the N1/P1 for the face and arm pictures categories and the VPP/N170 for the facial expression category while the mid-latency ERP components, N2 and P3, played key roles in differentiating true from false situations. The complex of N2 and P3 components may serve as a screening mechanism through which observers allocate their attentions to more important or relevant events and screen out false environmental information. This is the first study to describe and provide a time course of the screening process during pain empathy. These findings shed new light on the understanding of empathic processing.