| dc.description.abstract | Empathy, the ability to understand and experience others’ emotion, is thought to be an important precursor to prosocial behavior and plays a critical role in interpersonal relationship and social competence. From the perspective of developmental psychology, Hoffman proposed a model which outlined the developmental shift over time from self-oriented personal distress in response to others’ distress to sympathy for others, resulting in prosocial behavior. Recently, Decety, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, argued that affective arousal is the first component in place in development, followed by emotion understanding which develops lately and begins to be mature around the age of 2- to 3- years old, and finally the emotional regulation which develops throughout childhood and adolescent. In a previous study of our research team, EEG were recorded when adult participants performed pain judgment about dynamic animations which consisted of three consecutive pictures depicting painful or non-painful situations in others. This study revealed an anticipatory effect of N260 evoked by an imminent harm to others and increased late positive potentials (LPPs) when perceiving pain. Larger amplitudes of N260 were correlated with higher the ratings of unpleasantness. On the other hand, larger amplitudes of LPPs were correlated with higher dispositional measure of perspective taking in the interpersonal reactivity index (IRI). In the present study, we aimed to investigate the neurodevelopmental change of pain empathy from early to late childhood. We recorded EEG in adults and children when they were in sight of the visual animations depicting painful or non-painful situations. We measured the differential waves of N260 and LPPs as the indexes of affective arousal and affective evaluation in pain empathy, respectively. The results showed that, in children aged from 3 to 9, the differential waves of N260 decreased with age. More adaptive behaviors in socialization domain were correlated with smaller differential waves of N260. The amplitudes LPPs increased with age. More adaptive behaviors in the sub-domain of interpersonal relationship were correlated with larger differential waves of LPPs. These findings suggested a decrease in affective arousal and an increase in affective evaluation through the development course of pain empathy, which may resulted in transformation from self-focused personal distress to other-focused sympathy. These results supported both Hoffman’s and Decety’s theories.
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