Pain's echo: Empathy and the social communication of pain.

Two judgment studies were conducted to investigate (1) the effect of observer trait empathy on judging pain from facial expression (2) whether empathic pain facial expression of an intermediary encodes (echoes) pain experienced by a first to a third party. Experiment 1: High- and low-empathy judges viewed two-second thin-slice videos of models exhibiting pain, no-pain, and neutral facial expressions. Judges' faces were video-recorded while they rated the models' pain. Trait empathy scores were positively correlated with pain ratings: High-empathy judges tended to rate pain more highly than low-empathy judges. Experiment2: Participants (receivers) viewed 2-second clips of judges' facial expressions from Experiment 1 (Senders) to estimate Experiment 1 models' pain. Signal detection analyses indicated that receivers detected pain in models to a small, significant degree, suggesting the presence of an empathic pain echo' in observers of others' suffering. Implications for understanding the social communication of pain are discussed. --Leaf ii.