Background:

Empathy depends, to a large extent, on the ability to process the emotions that are expressed in the faces of other people.

Objective:

The objective of the present study was to evaluate the differences in the time course of cognitive processing of happy, neutral and angry faces in subjects with low and high empathy.

Method:

The study was carried out with 60 participants divided into two groups (low and high empathy), which observed happy, neutral and angry faces while recording the events related potentials (ERP) P100, N170 and LPP, as indicators of early attention, encoding of the stimulus as a human face and activation and attentional engagement.

Results:

No significant differences were found between groups in the P100 component. The N170 ERP was higher in the high empathy group and the LPP was higher to angry faces in the low empathy group.

Conclusions:

The results suggest that empathy does not have an effect on the response of early attention to faces, but it does increase the recognition of the stimulus as a human face and subjects with low empathy have greater attentional engagement to expressions of anger.