Empathy for pain in individuals influenced by moral identity: Evidence from an ERP study

Both morality and empathy are crucial in the construction of human society. The influence of morality on empathy also deserves researchers’ attention. This study used event-related potential techniques to control the degree of moral identity of participants through writing tasks and deeply explored the psychological processes and neural mechanisms of moral identity affecting pain empathy. Behavioral results for picture type showed that the response time to the pain pictures was longer than the nonpain pictures, the accuracy of pain pictures was lower than that of nonpain pictures and ratings of pain pictures were rated higher than non-pain picture. Behavioral results for moral identity showed that there were no significant differences in response time, accuracy, and rating. The interaction between picture type and moral identity was not significant. The ERP results showed that people with high moral identity had higher levels of empathy than those with low moral identity, and pain pictures induced smaller N2 amplitudes and larger Late Positive Component (LPC) amplitudes than nonpain pictures. For people with low moral identity, the pain picture amplitudes were not significantly different from the N2 and LPC amplitudes induced by the nonpain pictures. These results suggest that moral identity affects and moderates the early processing of emotional empathy in the N2 representation and the late processing of cognitive empathy in the LPC representation. Individuals with high moral identity are more likely to induce early automated processing of pain to others when stimulated by pain pictures, automatically sharing the negative emotions of others, which is manifested as having more emotional empathy. Individuals with high moral identity exhibit a more refined analytical evaluation of pain pictures and a conscious, top-down control of processing when stimulated by pain pictures, which is manifested as having more cognitive empathy. Whether in the emotional empathy stage or in the cognitive empathy stage, moral identity has an important impact on pain empathy, and higher moral identity is the premise of empathy for the pain of others.