Effect of empathy trait on attention to positive emotional stimuli: evidence from eye movements

The Influence of Affective Empathy on Online News Belief: The Moderated Mediation of State Empathy and News Type

The belief in online news has become a topical issue. Previous studies demonstrated the role emotion plays in fake news vulnerability. However, few studies have explored the effect of empathy on online news belief. This study investigated the relationship between trait empathy, state empathy, belief in online news, and the potential moderating effect of news type. One hundred and forty undergraduates evaluated 50 online news pieces (25 real, 25 fake) regarding their belief, state empathy, valence, arousal, and familiarity. Trait empathy data were collected using the Chinese version of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. State empathy was positively correlated with affective empathy in trait empathy and believability, and affective empathy was positively correlated with believability. The influence of affective empathy on news belief was partially mediated by state empathy and regulated by news type (fake, real). We discuss the influence of empathy on online news belief and its internal processes. This study shares some unique insights for researchers, practitioners, social media users, and social media platform providers.

Gut feelings: vagal stimulation reduces emotional biases

The vagus nerve is a key physical constituent of the gut-brain axis. Increasing attention has recently been paid to the role that the gut, and the microorganisms inhabiting it, play in emotion and cognition. Animal studies have revealed the importance of the vagus nerve in mediating communication between the gut microbiome and the central nervous system, resulting in changes in emotional behaviour. This has renewed interest in understanding the role of vagal signalling in human emotion, particularly since human studies have also shown that alterations in gut microbiome composition can affect emotion. While stimulating the vagus nerve can help treat some cases of severe depression, here we investigate whether vagal afferent signalling can influence emotional processing in healthy subjects. We use the dot-probe task to determine the effect of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation on attentional biases towards emotional stimuli in 42 volunteers. Participants received both active and sham treatments using a within-subject design. We show that transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation reduces the emotional bias towards faces expressing sadness and happiness, indicating a decrease in emotional reactivity. While our novel findings reveal the effect that vagal signalling can have on emotional biases in healthy subjects, future studies should seek to develop our understanding of the ways in which the microbiome interacts with, and stimulates, the vagus nerve. Since we find a reduction in emotional bias, most notably towards sadness, this may partly account for the effective use of vagus nerve stimulation in treatment-resistant depression. While its clinical application currently involves surgical stimulation, our results support the potential benefit of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation as a non-invasive, intermittent adjunctive therapy for patients with depression given its frequent association with emotional biases.

The influence of emotional salience on gaze behavior in low and high trait empathy: an exploratory eye-tracking study

Previous studies have shown that situational factors like emotional salience are associated with higher subjective levels of state empathy. The present eye-tracking study explored whether gaze behavior varies as a function of emotional salience between individuals with low and high self-reported trait empathy. In a between-subjects design, we presented three social scene images in the context of different emotion conditions (Scene 1: neutral versus positive; Scene 2: neutral versus negative; Scene 3: positive versus negative) and assessed the dwell times of individuals with low versus high self-reported empathy (measured with the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire; TEQ). Analyses revealed that whereas low- and high-TEQ participants differed in their gaze behavior after receiving neutral information, they did not differ after receiving positive or negative information. Our preliminary results suggest that gaze behavior may be more indicative of self-reported trait empathy in situations with low emotional salience than in situations with high emotional salience.