Culture–sex interaction in self‐report empathy: The theory and meta‐analyses

Abstract

Empathy is sharing and understanding others' emotions. Recently, researchers identified larger Western-Asian cultural differences in self-report empathy with females relative to males (i.e., the culture-sex interaction theory). Neglecting this phenomenon, previous researchers focused on identifying the cultural impact on empathy per se and reported divergent results. This meta-analysis aims to reveal the heterogeneity of the earlier publications and decode the heterogeneity as per the culture-sex interaction. The current results suggested the following: First, the cultural impact on empathy increased along with three sex stratification categories (male-only, mixed-sex, and female-only, in that order). Second, the effect size statistically differed between the binary classifications of sex (femaleonly > male-only). Third, the mixed-sex samples' effect size was positively regressed on the samples' sex ratio (i.e., percentage of females). The current results revealed the heterogeneity of previous publications and highlighted the significance of the culture-sex interaction effect on empathy for future investigations.

Dissociating cognitive and affective empathy across psychopathy dimensions: The role of interoception and alexithymia

“…The enhanced prominence of psychopathy in males vs. females has been meta-analytically validated, even after controlling for other personality traits (Muris et al, 2017;Sanz-García et al, 2021). Sex-empathy interaction is far more intricate, as current evidence suggests that sex differences may (or may not) arise from a complex interaction between methodological (self-report vs. experimental tasks), biological, and environmental factors (Konrath et al, 2011;Christov-Moore et al, 2014;Warrier et al, 2018;Abramson et al, 2020;Rochat, 2022;Zhao et al, 2022). Recent metaanalytical evidence also indicated that male subjects display enhanced cardiac interoceptive accuracy, despite findings being consistent with other interoceptive modalities (Prentice and Murphy, 2022).…”

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“… 1 To date, researchers have observed the “culture–sex interaction effect” in studies of self-esteem ( 2 ), emotional processing ( 3 ), and interpersonal empathy ( 4 , 5 ). …”