Narrative-based Pain Empathy Task
physical sensations, Pain, pain
CROSS
After each run of comments, subjects performed a Narrative-based Pain Empathy Task. There were 64 narrative stories used in the study–32 pain stories (describing painful physical sensations e.g. protagonist cut his finger with a sharp knife) and 32 no painful versions of each story. The stories were based on Bruneau and colleagues' experiment (2012) and translated into Polish. The original version and the back-translated versions were compared by a native speaker of Polish, considering the comparability of language and similarity of interpretability. Each of the stories was repeated twice, once with a Polish name and the corresponding picture (above the text) of a protagonist, and the other with an Arab name and the picture of the protagonistThe pictures used in the experimental task were faces from the Radboud Faces DatabaseParticipants were instructed to attentively read the stories accompanied by the names and faces (Photograph). Each story was displayed for 20 s on average (Story). Before each story, a fixation cross was presented for 20 s (Cross). Then, a face picture with the protagonist’s name underneath was displayed for 2 (± 0.5 s jitter) seconds on its own, then the story appeared underneath for an additional 12 s (± 1 s jitter). At the end, a response prompt with a scale appeared underneath the story for 6 s (± 1 s jitter) (Scale). A schematic display of fMRI design with example items of stimuli and a sample page that participants saw in the scanner can be seen in Fig. (After each stimulus, there was an interstimulus interval (ISI) on average for 2 s (± 0.5 s jitter). The prompt asked participants to indicate their empathy towards the protagonist on the following scale: 1 (At the end of the study, the participants were fully debriefed regarding the nature of the study and compensated for their participation with small gifts. Finally, the participants were asked open-ended questions about the Hateful or Neutral Comments to make sure that they had been paying attention to them. Based on these answers, we decided that all participants paid attention to the stimuli and could be included in the further analysis.