Empathic accuracy: age differences from adolescence into middle adulthood

Abstract

This study investigated age differences in empathic accuracy, the ability to correctly perceive others' emotions, in a sample of 151 boys and men from three age groups: adolescents (M = 16 years, SD = 1.04), young adults (M = 29 years, SD = 2.78), and middle-aged adults (M = 50 years, SD = 3.07). All participants viewed nine newly developed film clips, each depicting a boy or a man reliving one of three emotions (anger, sadness, or happiness), while talking about an autobiographical memory. Adolescents and middle-aged men were less accurate than young men, and these age differences were associated with parallel age differences in fluid-mechanical abilities. In addition, age differences in vocabulary, one indicator of crystallized-pragmatic intelligence, were associated with age differences in empathic accuracy in adolescent and young, but not middle-aged, men. Within the limitations of cross-sectional data, this study provides evidence for the idea that empathic accuracy is an effortful task that requires cognitive resources and, thus, may show a normative increase until young adulthood followed by periods of stability and decline in subsequent decades.

Empathy at work: The role of age and emotional job demands.

“…By employing ecologically valid tasks tailored to a context central to most adults, namely the work context, and integrating middle-aged adults (i.e., relatively old workers), we corroborated past work. Our findings suggest that recognizing others' emotions accurately may already decrease in middle adulthood (similar to Isaacowitz et al, 2007;Kunzmann et al, 2018), while our findings match studies that largely omit middle age by showing that older workers shared other people's emotions equally well as younger ones and even reported higher sympathy (Bailey et al, 2018;. Thus, age deficits in empathic accuracy are already evident at an age that often is considered as middle age and conceptualizations of midlife as a period of prime performance may be in need of qualification.…”

Children’s Mental State Talk, Empathy, and Attachments to Companion Animals

“…In contrast with past studies that show a female advantage in empathy across the lifespan (Kunzmann, Wieck, & Dietzel, 2018), the present results did not reveal any gender differences in children's empathy for companion animals. This finding could have been due to a variety of reasons.…”

Cognitive and Emotional Empathy in Young Adolescents: an fMRI Study

“…Previously, Greimel et al [24] found that male adolescents and young male adults showed no differences in a task requiring identification of other's emotions. Contrastingly, Kunzmann et al [25] found that the ability to accurately recognize another's emotion was significantly worse in a male adolescent group compared to a male adult group. The ability to accurately identify another's emotion is part of emotion recognition [26], which is a component of cognitive empathy [4,8,19].…”