Clinical and Counseling Psychology

Biography

Biography: Teen Li Tan

Abstract

Empathy is the ability to understand another’s feelings, and is rooted in the overlap between Self and Other. Perspective-taking, the ability to imagine how it is like in the place of another person, underlies the workings of empathy. Researchers who study perspective-taking have done so assuming perspective-taking to be a conscious activity. When an individual does encounter someone in pain, it is nonetheless more likely that his or her response is automatic and dependent on unconscious processes. Automatic perspective-taking in one’s judgment of another’s pain in turn provides self/other information that could affect the mechanisms of pain processing. The present study sought to clarify the mechanisms relating to a differentiation of Self and Other in pain empathy. The effects of automatic perspective-taking on pain judgment were explored using images of hands and feet with or without the possibility of injury and in either a self or other-perspective. In experiment 1, participants rated the images for how much pain they felt the person depicted would feel. Ratings and reaction times were analysed to reveal a significant main effect of perspective for reaction time only.  In experiment 2, participants were first primed with the same images by presenting a mask for 120ms followed by the images for 12ms. Participants then had to rapidly categorise a word as either pain or non-pain-related. Analysis of the reaction time data revealed a marginally significant interaction between perspective and word valence but no main effect of perspective. Findings suggest that the automatic self-perspective marginally facilitates pain processing, while the use of automatic perspective-taking as self/other information provides marginal support for the threat value of pain hypothesis that when an individual perceives pain in another, a threat-detection system is activated leading to an aversive response.