EEG microstates under naturalistic movie-watching: dissociating state and trait empathy with links to prosocial behavior
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Traditional empathy neuroscience relies heavily on static and repetitive stimuli, which limits the characterization of neural dynamics in naturalistic contexts. Whether EEG microstate analysis, a method applied predominantly in resting-state and clinical research, can capture continuous empathy-related brain dynamics remains unclear. To address this limitation, we combined EEG microstate analysis with a naturalistic movie-watching paradigm and a conventional empathy-related event-related potential task to examine task-evoked scalp-topographic dynamics and their associations with trait empathy and prosocial behavior. Thirty-five participants viewed neutral and empathy-evoking film clips during EEG recording, completed an empathy-related event-related potential (ERP) task, and provided measures of trait empathy and prosocial behavior via a donation task. Microstate analysis identified four distinct topographical configurations. Compared with neutral viewing, empathy-evoking viewing was characterized by an increased occurrence of microstate B and decreased durations of microstates C and D, as compared to neutral conditions. The event-related potential task additionally revealed enhanced P2 and P3 amplitudes for empathy-related stimuli. Notably, microstate B occurrence was positively correlated with the P2 empathy effect, but not with P3 amplitude. Furthermore, microstate C duration during empathy-evoking viewing was negatively associated with donation behavior, whereas microstate A duration and microstate B coverage were associated with trait empathy. Together, our findings indicate that EEG microstate analysis can detect condition-dependent changes in scalp-topographic dynamics during naturalistic empathy and reveal cross-paradigm associations with event-related potential, behavioral, and dispositional measures. More broadly, this study extends microstate analysis beyond resting-state and clinical applications to the investigation of naturalistic social-affective processing.
