title: Electroencephalographic α-band and β-band correlates of perspective-taking and personal distress.
abstract: Perspective-taking and personal distress are argued to play contrasting roles in empathic processing, with perspective-taking promoting empathic concern and personal distress promoting egoistic motivations. Previous research has shown that emotionally negative valence imagery induced α and β power changes relative to neutral imagery and that α activity relates inversely to empathy. We therefore investigated the hypothesis that enhanced β is associated with personal distress and is accompanied by a correlation between α and perspective-taking. Participants viewed negative and neutral valence images from the International Affective Picture System and made judgments about their levels of concern for humans in each image. As predicted, greater β enhancement was associated with higher personal distress, whereas greater α-band suppression was associated with lower perspective-taking abilities. We suggest that these data support Batson's Empathy-Altruism hypothesis in which failure to adopt another person's perspective is related to greater personal distress.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona 86011-5036, USA. Chad.Woodruff@nau.edu
authors.forename: Christopher Chad
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: Woodruff
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Daut
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brower
authors.forename: Ashanti
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bragg
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004645:Empathy / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted