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

近年来，越来越多的工作、学校以及与朋友和家人的社交互动都转移到了网上渠道，这一趋势在2019冠状病毒病大流行期间有所升级。此外，心理治疗和医疗咨询更频繁地依赖于数字媒体，这强调了研究在线交流如何影响我们与他人感同身受的能力的重要性。虽然人们可能会直观地认为与朋友或治疗师面对面的会议相比，在线会议是有利的，但这还有待于实证研究，特别是关于优势的性质及其潜在机制。在目前的项目中，我们想调查不同层次的社会存在是否以及如何影响同理心的行为和神经特征。社会存在，一个来自电信研究的概念，被定义为当前项目的程度，另一个是存在的，即，关于对方精神状态的语言和非语言线索的可用程度，以及社交互动的可能性。这个项目的首要假设是，社会存在将促进移情的认知和情感过程。基于我们在共情神经科学研究方面的互补专业知识，我们将利用已建立的实验范式来解决我们的研究问题：（i）我们将专注于疼痛的共情作为模型系统，因为它提供了良好的可控实验设置和已建立的共情读数;（ii）我们将利用我们在基于故事的移情准确性范式方面的专业知识，将这些发现转化为更自然的社会环境。这项研究从基本的心理学和神经科学的角度来看是相关的，并通过强调另一个人的存在程度作为迄今为止在很大程度上被忽视的社会互动方面，扩大了最近的方法论和理论辩论在社会神经科学。这项研究也是相关的，以了解当今不断变化的世界的影响，其中在线会议是新的规范，同情与他人，更广泛地说，我们与他人的沟通。

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.