Character drawing style in cartoons on empathy induction: an eye-tracking and EEG study

In its most basic form, empathy refers to the ability to understand another person's feelings and emotions, representing an essential component of human social interaction. Owing to an increase in the use of mass media, which is used to distribute high levels of empathy-inducing content, media plays a key role in individual and social empathy induction. We investigated empathy induction in cartoons using eye movement, EEG and behavioral measures to explore whether empathy factors correlate with character drawing styles. Two different types of empathy-inducing cartoons that consisted of three stages and had the same story plot were used. One had an iconic style, while the other was realistic style. Fifty participants were divided into two groups corresponding to the individual cartoon drawing styles and were presented with only one type of drawing style. We found that there were no significant differences of empathy factors between iconic and realistic style. However, the Induced Empathy Score (IES) had a close relationship with subsequent attentional processing (total fixation length for gaze duration). Furthermore, iconic style suppressed the fronto-central area more than realistic style in the gamma power band. These results suggest that iconic cartoons have the advantage of abstraction during empathy induction, because the iconic cartoons induced the same level of empathy as realistic cartoons while using the same story plot (top-down process), even though lesser time and effort were required by the cartoon artist to draw them. This also means that the top-down process (story plot) is more important than the bottom-up process (drawing style) in empathy induction when viewing cartoons.