Housing and Development Newsletter Taking their volunteer subjects to a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner housed in the basement of UCSB’s Psychology Building, the researchers conducted an “empathy task” in which the participants were shown descriptions of happy, sad or neutral events, followed by corresponding emotional faces of their partners and of strangers. The volunteers were asked to count backward by seven from a large number “to wash away the effects of experiencing any kind of emotion,” between the facial photo displays. “Then they were asked to provide some responses to tell us how they felt when they were shown each face image,” Acevedo said. After that, the participants were instructed to relax, while their brains were scanned.