Differentiating Neural Temporal Dynamics Between Self-Referential and Other-Oriented Perspectives When Exposure to Emotional Stimuli

Perspective-taking influences various aspects of an individual’s own cognition, including pain perception and emotional evaluation. Yet, the temporal dynamics through which perspective-taking shapes emotional processing—particularly when adopting perspectives imbued with distinct social characteristics—remain poorly understood. To address this, the present study examined how adopting three perspectives (self, insensitive, sensitive) modulates the affective evaluation of emotional images (negative, neutral). After adopting the assigned perspective, participants rated each image’s valence and arousal while their neural activity was recorded via event-related potentials (ERPs). Behaviorally, compared to the self-perspective, valence ratings for negative pictures were more positive under the insensitive perspective and more negative under the sensitive perspective; arousal ratings showed a parallel pattern. Neurally, perspective-taking influenced emotional processing across three temporal stages: early (P1, N1: <150 ms), middle (EPN: 270–320 ms), and late (LPP: 400–800 ms). Cross-lagged correlation analysis further revealed a strong negative coupling between frontal (F1, F2, F3, F4) and occipital (PO3, PO4, PO7, PO8) electrodes, with occipital activity consistently preceding frontal activity by approximately 1.24 ms. These findings not only provide direct neurophysiological evidence that perspective-taking dynamically modulates emotional processing over time, but also demonstrate that different socially embedded perspectives yield dissociable influences on concurrent cognitive stages. Critically, the impact of perspective-taking on emotion is both temporally extended and spatially distributed across anterior and posterior brain networks.