Skin Color and Attractiveness Modulate Empathy for Pain: An Event-Related Potential Study

Although racial in-group bias in empathy for pain has been reported, empathic responses to others’ pain may be influenced by other characteristics besides race. To explore whether skin color and attractiveness modulate empathy for pain, we recorded 24 participants’ reactions to painful faces from racial in-group members with different skin color (fair, wheatish, or dark) and attractiveness (more or less attractive) using event-related potentials (ERPs). Results showed that, for more attractive painful faces, dark skin faces were judged as less painful and elicited smaller N2 amplitudes than fair- and wheatish-skinned faces. However, for less attractive faces, there were no significant differences among the three skin colors. Our findings suggest that empathy for pain toward racial in-group members may be influenced by skin color and attractiveness.

Data Mining Approaches for Sentiment Analysis in Online Social Networks (OSNs)

IoT technology and the widespread usage of public networking platforms and apps also made it possible to use data mining in extracting useful perspectives from unorganised knowledge. In the age of big data, opinion mining may be applied as a valuable way in order to classify views into various sentiment and in general to determine the attitude of the population. Other methods to OSA have been established over the years in various datasets and evaluated in varying conditions. In this respect, this chapter highlights the scope of OMSA strategies and forms of implementing OMSA principles. Besides technological issues of OMSA, this chapter also outlined both technical problems regarding its production and non-technical issues regarding its use. There are obstacles for potential study.