ArticleScientific reports2015
Measuring empathy for human and robot hand pain using electroencephalography.
Article in Scientific reports, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 163 citations in OpenAlex.
- Meta-analysis of ERP investigations of pain empathy underlines methodological issues in ERP research.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2018Pooled it
- Music induced happy mood suppresses the neural responses to other's pain: Evidences from an ERP study.Scientific reports · 2017Trial
- Causing a robot to display happy but not sad facial expression leads to sensory attenuation.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Empathy-related individual differences in brain responses to robot and human pain.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- How multimodal narrative and visual representations of human-like service robots shape attitudes and social connection.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2025Article
- Roles, Users, Benefits, and Limitations of Chatbots in Health Care: Rapid Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Review
- Attachment to robots and therapeutic efficiency in mental health.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The positive-negative-competence (PNC) model of psychological responses to representations of robots.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Robots with tears can convey enhanced sadness and elicit support intentions.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2023Article
- Understanding the neural mechanisms of empathy toward robots to shape future applications.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2023Article
- Embodiment modifies attention allotment for the benefit of dual task performance.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Bodily ownership of an independent supernumerary limb: an exploratory study.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The influence of social pain experience on empathic neural responses: the moderating role of gender.Experimental brain research · 2022Article
- Empathy for pain in individuals with autistic traits during observation of static and dynamic stimuli.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- The Moral Consideration of Artificial Entities: A Literature Review.Science and engineering ethics · 2021Review
- Can You Activate Me? From Robots to Human Brain.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2021Article
- Dynamic human and avatar facial expressions elicit differential brain responses.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2020Article
- Neural correlates of negative expectancy and impaired social feedback processing in social anxiety.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2020Article
- Empathy modulates the temporal structure of social attention.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Fronto-parietal coding of goal-directed actions performed by artificial agents.Human brain mapping · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This study provides the first physiological evidence of humans' ability to empathize with robot pain and highlights the difference in empathy for humans and robots. We performed electroencephalography in 15 healthy adults who observed either human- or robot-hand pictures in painful or non-painful situations such as a finger cut by a knife. We found that the descending phase of the P3 component was larger for the painful stimuli than the non-painful stimuli, regardless of whether the hand belonged to a human or robot. In contrast, the ascending phase of the P3 component at the frontal-central electrodes was increased by painful human stimuli but not painful robot stimuli, though the interaction of ANOVA was not significant, but marginal. These results suggest that we empathize with humanoid robots in late top-down processing similarly to human others. However, the beginning of the top-down process of empathy is weaker for robots than for humans.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.