Observing painful vs. soft treatment of virtual humans: A Virtual-Reality-Based ERP Study

Observing others in pain-inducing situations induces changes in the
observer’s neural activity in substrates related to both affective and
sensory processing of pain (e.g. insula, cingulate, and somatosensory
cortices. This neural empathetic resonance to others’ pain is attenuated
when the pain victim belongs to a different social group or has a
different ethnic appearance. Introducing a new inter-ethnic ingroup is shown to reduce the ethnicity-related ingroup bias in neural emphatic resonance. Moreover, transferring people to a virtual body with a skin color that differs from their own skin color reduces ingroup biases and implicit racial attitudes.
In 2021, Harjunen et al. showed that virtual body transfer
modulates the effect of ethnicity on sensorimotor beta ERD to the
observed painful vs. soft treatment. Here, we examine the same data
on the time domain to see whether similar modulation of self-other
resemblance can be found in ERPs. SVM-decoding and RSA revealed a robust effect of painfulness from ERPs. Unlike previous ERSP findings, the SVM-decoding or RSA analyses did not reveal moderating influences of target skin color or the virtual body transfer on ERPs to virtual vicarious pain stimuli.