Mohit Goel received his Master of Science – Dual Degree in Computational Natural Sciences (CNS).  His research work was supervised by Dr. Kavita Vemuri. Here’s a summary of of his research work on Modulation of empathy-related response towards profession of female rape victims:

Empathy plays a significant role in pervasive cooperation and prosocial behaviour among heterogeneous groups of individuals in the animal kingdom. It modulates one’s responses to the emotions and pain of others. It enables one to understand and share the feelings of others and then act accordingly and appropriately. The phenomenon of empathy has been researched in several areas such as philosophy, clinical, social and developmental psychology, social and neural sciences, etc. and still a mystery leading to interesting academic research. A plethora of factors have been found to modulate empathy. The aim of this study was to investigate how socioeconomic standing (in particular profession) of an individual (specifically women rape-victims) affects the empathic responses of the participant, both neuronally and behaviourally. This study focuses specifically on empathy towards pain as experienced by another. A three-part experimental study was conducted to explore the neural correlates of empathy in an individual when biased by the knowledge of the profession of the character (female rape-victim). The first part of this study focused on establishing if a bias existed and is reflected in behavioral responses in society towards different career professions opted by women. For this, we conducted an online survey with 21 professions (opted by women) and collected the respectability score. We observed a difference in the average respectability score for different professions thereby confirming the existence of a difference in attitudes towards different professions pursued by women. Progressing on the findings from the first part, the next stage focused on investigating the difference in empathic responses (behaviorally) of individuals towards the pain of others (female rape-victims). Towards this, a second survey was conducted where the participants were presented with the fictional incident of a rape incident narrated as post incident trauma from the victim’s point of view. The narratives were designed to differ only in depictions of the profession of the victim. Standard questionnaires used to measure empathic responses were presented to participants in addition to the narrative specific questions. We found differences in empathic responses to perceived pain of victims as a function of the profession of the purported rape-victim. Given the observations and knowledge from the first two stages, the last stage focused on investigating differences in the empathy supported neural areas in response to the pain of the victim (from narratives presented in the second stage) given the knowledge of her profession. For this, an fMRI experimental study was conducted. The collected data was analyzed using both general linear model (GLM) and independent component analysis (ICA) approaches. The results from initial investigation showed the activations evoked in empathy related brain areas for the narrative with ‘Bar dancer’ profession to be relatively much lower compared to other narratives with different profession- (Teacher) – and the one with no profile or profession details mentioned to be relatively highest. This was the most important confirmatory finding of our study about possible deep rooted implicit bias as a function of the socioeconomic status of a female rape victim in particular and women in general. The results from the fMRI analysis confirm the presence of predominant activity in areas such as prefrontal areas (superior, middle and inferior), cingulate cortex (anterior and middle), posterior-medial frontal, precentral gyrus, superior and inferior medial gyrus having a major role in cognitive empathy network. Simultaneous but distributed activations in insular region and rolandic operculum confirmed the role in emotional empathy network along with ACC/MCC. Activations in clusters of voxels belonging to the temporal gyrus, prefrontal gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus and precuneus, areas investigated for social context identification, memory encoding and retrieval, recalling of episodic memories, self processing and cognitive processing, were also noted. The results from this study presents the first evidence at the neural level of differential rape victim empathy existing in society influenced by socioeconomic standing of female individual and provides a foundation enabling us to form neural models as well as behavioural paradigms using naturalistic tasks. Narratives are powerful mediums and can provide for stronger responses and be applied while collecting data from sexual offenders, convicted rapists and general public.

April 2023