Pleasing frowns, disappointing smiles: an ERP investigation of counterempathy

The biological predisposition to resonate emotionally with another person is regarded as a critical aspect of social interaction. There are, however, situations in which the emotional response to others is discordant with their emotional experience. Using event-related potentials, the present study investigated the neural underpinnings of this phenomenon, termed "counterempathy." Participants played a card game under the belief that they were playing jointly with another player who sat in an adjoining room and whose smiles and frowns in response to winning or losing in the game they could observe on a computer screen. Depending upon the experimental setting, the other player's facial expressions conveyed either of two opposing values to the participant. In the empathic setting, his emotional expressions were congruent with the participant's outcome (win or loss), whereas in the counterempathic setting, they indicated incongruent outcomes. Results revealed a reversed pattern of brain responses to facial expressions between congruent and incongruent conditions at ~170 ms (N170) over the temporal cortex. That is, N170 was sensitive to frowns in the congruent condition and to smiles in the incongruent condition, both indicating losses for the participant. Furthermore, frowns in the incongruent condition yielded larger medial frontal negativity (MFN) over the medial prefrontal cortex, which correlated with the subjective pleasantness about one's own winning in the incongruent condition. These findings demonstrate that (1) counterempathic responses are associated with modulation of early sensory processing of emotional cues, (2) that MFN is sensitive to the detection of another person's loss during positive inequity, and (3) that MFN is associated with a pleasant feeling during positive inequity, which is possibly related to "Schadenfreude."