EEG Hyperscanning Dataset on the Effects of Group Identity on Intra-Brain Functional Connectivity and Inter-Brain Synchrony During Empathy for Social Pain in Deaf Individuals

The Cyberball paradigm was used to create social acceptance and social exclusion contexts. Deaf individuals served as ingroup targets and hearing individuals as outgroup targets, allowing the study to examine neural activity when deaf empathizers observed members of different social groups experiencing acceptance and exclusion.

Thirty participant groups were initially recruited, with each group consisting of one deaf empathizer, one deaf empathy target, and one hearing empathy target. One group was excluded because no clear experience of social exclusion was reported, leaving 29 groups for the formal analyses. During the experiment, each deaf empathizer separately observed the deaf and hearing targets completing the Cyberball game, and the order of the two targets was counterbalanced across participant groups.