A comparison of counselors and matched controls in maintaining different brain responses to the same stimuli under the self-perspective and the other-perspective.

To perceive the world from the perspective of their clients, counselors need to transpose themselves into the inner states of their clients when empathizing with them. Without a self-other distinction, the counselors may confuse their clients' experience with that of their own, which leads to personal distress and has detrimental effects on their well being. The present study recorded event-related potentials (ERP) of two groups of participants (counselors and matched controls) watching the same sets of unpleasant and neutral pictures from either the self-perspective or the other-perspective. The results revealed significant differences in the N2 component over the frontal-central regions between the self-perspective and the other-perspective and in the late positive potential (LPP) component over the central-parietal regions, irrespective of the stimulus type. The differences detected in LPP were specific to the counselor group. Moreover, unpleasant pictures elicited smaller N2 and larger LPP activations compared with neutral pictures. Our results indicated that the counselors' self-other distinction began at the early automatic process stage and continued until the late cognitive evaluation stage. The counselors' ability to maintain a self-other distinction might prevent them from being overly involved in the clients' experiences and relieve their personal distress.