Citation

He W, Jiang W, Zhu J, Xu Y, Zhao H. Soc. Psychol. (Gott.) 2022; 53(2): 107-120.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Hogrefe and Huber Publishers)

DOI

10.1027/1864-9335/a000480

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

. This study describes two experiments conducted to investigate the modifying effect of trait empathy on attentional processing of emotionally laden (i.e., aggression-related) words in frustrating situations. A dot-probe task was used in the first experiment. The results showed that low-empathy individuals exhibited attentional bias toward aggressive words under both frustrating and nonfrustrating conditions. High-empathy individuals demonstrated attentional bias only under frustrating conditions. In the second experiment, the effect of frustration on high-empathy individuals' aggression was reflected by N200, P300, and late positive potential amplitudes. It was discussed that these amplitudes might indicate that frustrating situations caused high-empathy individuals to show attentional bias toward aggressive words. Our findings suggested that high-empathy individuals were sensitive to emotionally laden (i.e., aggression-related) stimuli under frustrating conditions.

Language: en

Keywords

aggressive tendency; event-related potentials (ERPs); frustrating conditions; trait empathy