The Charactertistics and neural mechanisms of trait and state empathy in deaf individuals

Empathy deficiencies are prevalent among deaf individuals. It has yet to be determined whether they exhibit deficiencies in both trait empathy and state empathy, along with the effect of top-down attention. Here, the current study employed the IRI-C scale and physiological pain empathy tasks (A-P task and A-N task) to explore the temporal dynamics of neural activities when deaf individuals were processing second-hand painful/non-painful stimuli. For trait empathy, we found that deaf individuals have deficiencies in both emotional and cognitive empathy compared to their hearing counterparts. For state empathy, we found that deaf individuals showed stronger automatic emotional empathy responses and paid more cognitive evaluation resources. Moreover, the differential processing of empathy between deaf individuals and hearing individuals towards others’ pain could be regulated by top-down attention, which occurs both in the early and late processing stages of pain empathy.