Vicarious embarrassment as a social pain emotion has been studied from cognitive and neuroimaging perspectives. However, the dynamic time course of vicarious embarrassment remains unclear. We conducted an event-related potential (ERP) study to investigate the temporal dynamics of vicarious embarrassment and examine the role of perspective-taking in an emotional judgment task. The ERP results showed that vicarious embarrassment evoked more negative MFN (250–310 ms) and N400 (400–520 ms) components than the neutral condition over the frontal region. The time-frequency analysis results showed that, in the 200–1,600 ms time window, greater alpha power was elicited when participants imagined themselves rather than others in an awkward situation; in the 500–1,900 ms time window, for both groups, vicarious embarrassment involved greater theta oscillations than the neutral condition over the frontal region. These results extend previous findings that vicarious emotion involves mentalizing processes, and demonstrate that people first detect and evaluate the target’s misconduct and negative outcomes and then experience the vicarious embarrassment.

已经从认知和神经影像学的角度研究了作为社交痛苦情绪的替代尴尬。然而，替代尴尬的动态时间过程仍不清楚。我们进行了一项事件相关电位 (ERP) 研究，以调查替代尴尬的时间动态，并检查观点采择在情绪判断任务中的作用。ERP 结果表明，与中性条件相比，替代性尴尬在额叶区域引起了更多的负 MFN（250-310 ms）和 N400（400-520 ms）分量。时频分析结果表明，在 200-1600 ms 的时间窗口内，当参与者想象自己而不是他人处于尴尬境地时，会引发更大的 alpha 功率；在 500–1,900 ms 时间窗口内，对于两组，替代的尴尬涉及比额叶区域的中性条件更大的θ振荡。这些结果扩展了之前的发现，即替代情绪涉及心理化过程，并表明人们首先发现和评估目标的不当行为和负面结果，然后体验替代的尴尬。