Empathic responses to unknown others are modulated by shared behavioural traits.

ABSTRACT: How empathically people respond to a stranger's pain or pleasure does not only depend on the situational context, individual traits and intentions, but also on interindividual factors. Here we ask whether empathic responses towards unknown others are modulated by behavioural similarity as a potential marker of genetic relatedness. Participants watched two supposed human players who were modelled as having a strong (player LP) or weak (player NLP) tendency to lead in social situations executing penalty shots in a virtual reality robot soccer game. As predicted, empathic response were modulated by shared behavioural traits: participants whose tendency to lead was more similar to player LP's tendency to lead experienced more reward, and showed stronger neural activity in reward-related brain

SUBMITTER: Anders S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7005154 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature