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Previous neuroimaging studies have identified a neural circuit that is involved in empathy for pain. However, the temporal dynamics of neural activities underlying empathic processes remains poorly understood. This was investigated in the current study by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from healthy adults who were presented with pictures or cartoons of hands that were in painful or neutral situations. Subjects performed a pain judgment task that required attention to pain cues in the stimuli or a counting task that withdrew their attention from these cues. The ERP results showed early differentiation between painful and neutral stimuli over the frontal lobe at 140ms after sensory stimulation. A long-latency empathic response was observed after 380ms over the central–parietal regions and was more salient over the left than right hemispheres. The early and late empathic responses were, respectively …