Objectives
Two studies examined whether observers’ personality traits contribute to prosocial responses to others’ facial expression of pain. Experiment 1 examined the personality traits that could account for observers’ variability in estimating others’ pain intensity. Experiment 2 questioned to what extent the contribution of personality traits on inclination to help people in pain depend on observers’ beliefs about pain’ characteristics.
Method
59 (experiment 1) and 76 (experiment 2) participants observed to 3-D realistic synthetic face movements mobilizing action units of pain, in order to estimate others’ pain. In experiment 2, painful localizations (e.g., chest, hand) were also manipulated. In each experiment, Big Five personality traits were assessed.
Results
Experiment 1 revealed that agreeableness and conscientiousness contributed to observers’ pain estimates across the increase of facial expression intensity. Experiment 2 showed that conscientiousness contributed to observers’ judgments whatever pain’ characteristics. Neuroticism was only salient for pain referring to life-threatening pain.
Conclusion
Prosocial response to others’ pain depends on agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. However, these links are modulated by the pain behavior elicited and observers’ belief about the characteristic of pain.
Recognizing and interpreting other’s pain can be of great importance to the suffering person and the observer (Craig, Versloot, Goubert, Vervoort, & Crombez, 2010). It permits recognition of potential danger, provides opportunity for harm avoidance and allows appreciation of what is happening to the person in pain (Craig, 2009). Expressive pain behaviors convey information to observers about the sufferer’s internal experience and needs for assistance or provision of care (Craig et al., 2010). Among the different pain behaviors, i.e., guarding, touching, facial expression, words, sounds (Prkachin, Schultz, Berkowitz, Hughes, & Hunt, 2002), facial expressions of pain play an important role in social communication (Craig, 2009, Prkachin and Craig, 1995 and Williams, 2002).
Less investigated is the striking variability of sensitivity to other’s pain behavior among observers (Goubert et al., 2005 and Hadjistavropoulos and Craig, 2002). A few studies revealed that psychological dispositions, e.g., empathy, pain catastrophizing (Green et al., 2009 and Sullivan et al., 2006), affect the sensitivity to other’s pain. Interestingly, no study has examined the contribution of Big Five personality traits to prosocial response to other’s pain. Yet, personality traits reflect the relatively enduring, automatic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that differentiate people from one another, and that are elicited in trait-evoking situations (McCrae & Costa, 1990). According to the Big Five theory, they can be specified in terms of five broad traits, i.e., extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness/intellect. Among these five traits, conscientiousness and agreeableness are of particular interest because they are linked with prosocial responses. Conscientiousness describes individual differences in the propensity to self-control, to be responsible to others, and (social) rule abiding (John and Srivastava, 1999 and Roberts et al., 2009). Agreeableness contrasts a prosocial and communal orientation toward others and includes traits such as altruism (Costa & McCrae, 1995). Moreover, several studies have shown that Big Five personality traits influence the way people perceive facial expressions of other people (i.e., positive or negative faces) and thus might affect judgment of emotional information (Czerwon et al., 2011 and Knyazev et al., 2008). Recently, Czerwon et al. (2011) revealed a positive bias in people high in agreeableness or conscientiousness for valence judgments of positive faces. Knyazev et al. (2008) found agreeableness and conscientiousness predisposed people to perceive faces as more friendly.
Thus, the aim of the study is to determine to what extent Big Five personality traits contribute to other’s pain assessments. It was hypothesized that conscientiousness and agreeableness would particularly contribute to observers’ judgments when facing other’s facial expression of pain. A converging multi-method approach was used to test this hypothesis. Experiment 1 analyzed the relationship between personality traits and others’ pain intensity. Experiment 2 focused on personality traits’ contribution on inclination to help someone in pain.
