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转移到了在线渠道，这一趋势在新冠肺炎疫情期间升级。此外，心理治疗和医疗咨询更多地依赖于数字媒体，数字媒体强调研究在线交流如何影响我们移情他人的能力的重要性。尽管人们可能会直观地认为与朋友或治疗师面对面的会面比在线会议更有优势，但这还有待实证研究，特别是关于优势的性质及其潜在机制。在目前的项目中，我们想要调查不同程度的社交存在是否以及如何影响移情的行为和神经特征。社交存在是源于电信研究的一个概念，在当前项目中被定义为他人存在的程度，即关于他人心理状态的言语和非言语线索的可获得性程度，以及社交互动的可能性程度。这个项目的主要假设是，社会存在将促进同理心的认知和情感过程。在我们在神经科学研究方面的互补专业知识的基础上，我们将利用既定的实验范式来解决我们的研究问题：(I)我们将重点关注疼痛的共情作为一个模型系统，因为它提供了可控的实验设置和既定的共情读数；(Ii)我们将利用我们在基于故事的共情准确性范式中的专业知识，将这些发现转化为更自然的社会环境。这项研究从心理学和神经科学的基本观点来看是相关的，并通过强调另一个人的存在程度作为迄今为止被很大程度上忽视的社会互动方面，扩展了最近社会神经科学中的方法论和理论辩论。这项研究对于理解当今不断变化的世界的影响也是相关的，在这个世界上，在线会议是新的规范，对于移情他人，更广泛地说，对于我们与他人的交流来说，这项研究也是相关的。

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.