Acute psychosocial stress and emotion regulation skills modulate empathic reactions to pain in others

Gabriele Buruck, Johannes Wendsche, Marlen Melzer, Alexander Strobel, Denise Dörfel

Psychosocial stress affects resources for adequate coping with environmental demands. A crucial question in this context is the extent to which acute psychosocial stressors impact empathy and emotion regulation. In the present study, 120 participants were randomly assigned to a control group vs. a group confronted with the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), an established paradigm for the induction of acute psychosocial stress. Empathy for pain as a specific subgroup of empathy was assessed via pain intensity ratings during a pain-picture task. Self-reported emotion regulation skills were measured as predictors using an established questionnaire. Stressed individuals scored significantly lower on the appraisal of pain pictures. A regression model was chosen to find variables that further predict the pain ratings. These findings implicate that acute psychosocial stress might impair empathic processes to observed pain in another person and the ability to accept one's emotion additionally predicts the empathic reaction. Furthermore, the ability to tolerate negative emotions modulated the relation between stress and pain judgments, and thus influenced core cognitive-affective functions relevant for coping with environmental challenges. In conclusion, our study emphasizes the necessity of reducing negative emotions in terms of empathic distress when confronted with pain of another person under psychosocial stress, in order to be able to retain pro-social behavior.