Emerging Infectious Outbreak Inhibits Pain Empathy Mediated Prosocial Willingness

Background: The pandemic of COVID-19 sets off public psychological crises and impacts social functioning. Pre-pandemic research has shown that as the mental resource wears out under long-term distress, empathy exhaustion will happen. While prosocial activities are positively linked to empathy, quantitative research on the pandemic's effect on empathy and prosocial willingness has been insufficiently examined. Prosocial behaviors are carried out during a life-threatening time to promote communication and encourage community members to survive emergencies such as food shortages and natural disasters. This study examined how emotion, empathy and prosocial behaviors during pandemic era in China. Methods: Before (N=520, 11/21/2019-11/23/2019) and during(N=570, 2/23/2020-2/24/2020) the COVID-19 pandemic, we explored an empathy-driven prosociality relationship through an online task and questionnaires with a total of 1190 participants. With the evaluation of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral tendencies affected before and during the COVID-19 outbreak, specifically via measures of empathic concern, pain empathy, and prosocial willingness, we explore the potential factors that the pandemic undermines, especially the mass mental resources (i.e. anxiety, empathy concern). Findings: We found a population-based decline in empathy that ultimately affected prosocial willingness. Compared to the pre-outbreak period, the score of prosocial willingness decreased significantly from 3·73 (95% CI 3·63–3·64) to 3·50 (95% CI 3·41–3·60) during the COVID-19 outbreak. Through mediation analysis, we examine an empathy-driven prosociality change in which empathic concern positively predict prosocial willingness through through the perception of the others’ pain. Over the pandemic era, however, this relationship became less salient. Moreover, a distance effect in such a situation, consistent with the ripple effect, affected the way in which short-term anxiety during the outbreak influences empathic concern. Interpretations: By a two-group comparison, a population-based empathy reduction is in accordance with the compassion fatigue theory. The underlying mechanism may correlate with decreasing perception of others’ pain (pain empathy) associated with empathic concern, perspective-taking and emotional states such as anxiety from overexposure to news during the outbreak. Measures are needed to alleviate the negative effects of empathy fatigue induced issues after the outbreak. Funding Statement: This work is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC: U1736125, 61621136008, 31871142), and SRG of University of Macau. Declaration of Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest. Ethics Approval Statement: The research paradigm was approved by the China Academy of Science ethics committee, and all actors in the video recording gave informed consent to participate in the study.