Empathy task and behavioral ratings
pain
POSITIVE
The empathy task, a passive viewing task, was designed to measure empathic responses to positive and negative scenarios. Participants were presented with different luminance‐controlled black‐and‐white stimuli depicting children in scenes with an emotionally negative, positive, or neutral context. Positive stimuli showed rewarding social interactions, children playing together, or parent–infant interactions. Negative images showed children in distressing scenes, for example, an isolated crying child. Based on independent subjective evaluations, stimuli were selected that elicit sympathetic, but not aversive, responses to limit the possibility of personal distress in our participants, which might occur observing physical pain in others. Neutral images depicted children executing a task or playing with toys, with a neutral facial expression and without social interaction. Stimuli were preselected through a rating procedure from a larger set of 120 images obtained after an internet search in a pilot study. Images were rated on empathic content and positivity by 24 female participants (mean age = 34.45, A total of 72 images, 24 images per condition, were presented to the participant in a block design, with each image being presented twice but randomized and never within the same block. This resulted in a total of 18 blocks, divided into six blocks per condition. Every block lasted 24,000 ms and consisted of eight stimuli of the same valence, each presented for 3000 ms. A fixation cross was displayed at the start of the task and at the beginning of each block for the duration of 5500 ms.Participants were instructed to attend the images presented to them carefully. The same task using the same stimuli was performed in both sessions. At the end of each fMRI session, outside of the scanner, participants performed an additional rating task containing a random selection of 36 pictures from the same stimuli, 12 of each condition, on how much compassion (Dutch: “medelijden”) they felt for the child in the image on a 10‐point Likert scale (0 = 