EAPSI: Investigating How Stoicism Influences Empathy for Pain: A Cross-Cultural Neuroimaging Study

Anderson Steven R, Miami FL

Investigators

Abstract

Brain imaging studies have demonstrated that empathy, an adaptive and often automatic process occurring when we view pain in others, may be influenced by social and cultural factors. Stoicism, or the endurance of discomfort without outward expression, is a factor relevant to pain perception that is known to differ between East Asian and Western individuals. This project will use neuroimaging to test whether culturally variable beliefs about stoicism influence empathy for pain in a sample of Chinese and American individuals. The data from this project will prove useful in understanding how social and cultural factors influence empathy. Research will be performed in collaboration with Dr. Shihui Han in the Culture and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Peking University. Dr. Han is an expert in the social and cultural neuroscience of empathy. This award supports a cross-cultural neuroimaging study in China and the United States to investigate the effect of stoicism beliefs on empathy and to identify neurobiological mechanisms of the hypothesized effect. The experiment will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity during an emotion regulation task in response to negative and neutral images. The experiment will also measure the neural empathic response to pain in others. The experimenter will test 1) if differences in stoicism beliefs predict differences in the emotion regulation strategy of expressive suppression, and 2) if differences in neural activity during suppression explain variation in the neural empathic response to pain. The data collected from participants in China will be compared to results from participants in the United States. By comparing functional brain activity during an emotion regulation task with the neural empathic response to pain in a cross-cultural sample, this research will contribute to our understanding of how culturally variable beliefs about pain influence empathic responding. This award, under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program, supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and China's Ministry of Science and Technology.