The impact of social presence on the behavioral and neural signatures of empathy

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In recent years, an increasing number of social interactions at work, school and with our friends and family have moved to online channels, a trend that has escalated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Also, psychotherapeutic and medical counselling rely more frequently on digital media, which emphasizes the importance of studying how online communication affects our ability to empathize with the other. Although one might intuitively consider an in-person meeting with a friend or therapist as advantageous compared to an online session, this is yet to be empirically investigated, especially regarding the nature of the advantages and their underlying mechanisms. With the current project, we want to investigate if and how different levels of social presence affect the behavioral and neural signatures of empathy. Social presence, a concept derived from telecommunication research, is defined for the current project as the degree to which the other is present, i.e., the degree to which verbal and non-verbal cues about the other’s mental state are available and to which social interaction is possible. The overarching hypothesis of this project is that social presence will facilitate cognitive and affective processes of empathy. Building on our complementary expertise in neuroscientific research on empathy, we will leverage established experimental paradigms to address our research question: (i) we will focus on empathy for pain as a model system as it offers well controllable experimental setups and established read-outs of empathy; (ii) we will translate these findings to more naturalistic social settings by capitalizing on our expertise in story-based empathic accuracy paradigms. This research is relevant from a basic psychological and neuroscientific point of view and expands recent methodological and theoretical debates in social neuroscience by highlighting the degree of presence of another person as a hitherto largely neglected aspect of social interactions. The research is also relevant in order to understand the implications of today’s changing world, in which online meetings are the new norm, for empathizing with others and, more broadly speaking, for our communication with others.