The influence of moral characteristics on social pain empathy: evidence from event-related potential and eye-tracking techniques

Previous studies have revealed that the moral level of targets can influence individuals' empathic responses toward them. Here, we investigated the visual attention patterns and neural mechanisms related to how moral characteristics modulate individuals' empathic responses to social pain via a word-priming social exclusion empathy task in which participants needed to judge whether the target persons with a high or low moral level were excluded or not in social situations. We found that for ERPs, when participants viewed neutral images, a significantly more negative N1 component was evoked in low-moral priming condition and a significantly more positive P3 component was evoked in high-moral priming condition. Regarding eye-tracking metrics, when participants viewed social exclusion images, the fixation time-related metrics under high-moral priming condition were significantly longer than those under low-moral priming condition. We speculate that this may be related to the expected conflict experienced by the participants when they saw high-moral individuals being socially excluded. This expected conflict may have caused attentional avoidance in that situation, which may be related to the relatively lower emotional arousal. This attentional avoidance during the early stage of visual processing resulted in significantly more cognitive resources being invested and longer fixation time-related metrics.