Beyond physical sensations: investigating empathy and prosocial behavior in vicarious pain responders.

ABSTRACT: Empathy, the capacity to share others' emotional experiences, has been proposed as a key motivation for altruistic behavior in both humans and animals. Sharing another's emotional experience may generate a self-embodied simulation of their emotional state, fostering understanding and promoting prosocial behavior. Vicarious pain responders report sensing physical pain when observing others in pain. Whether this ability extends to emotional experiences remains unexplored. Using both questionnaires and ecologically valid behavioral tasks, we explored whether vicarious pain responders differ from nonresponders in empathic abilities and prosocial behavior. Participants watched video clips of people describing a negative emotional life event. We operationalized several empathic abilities and res

SUBMITTER: Ben Adiva Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11220461 | biostudies-literature | 2024 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature