The ageing of the social mind: replicating the preservation of socio-affective and the decline of socio-cognitive processes in old age

Abstract

Anticipating population ageing to reach a historically unprecedented level in this century and considering the public goal of promoting well-being until old age, research in many fields has started to focus on processes and factors that contribute to healthy ageing. Since human interactions have a tremendous impact on our mental and physical well-being, scientists are increasingly investigating the basic processes that enable successful social interactions such as social affect (empathy, compassion) and social cognition (Theory of Mind). However, regarding the replication crisis in psychological science it is crucial to probe the reproducibility of findings revealed by each specific method. To this end, we aimed to replicate the effect of age on empathy, compassion and Theory of Mind observed in Reiter and colleagues' study (Reiter et al. 2017 Sci. Rep. 7 , 11046 ( doi:10.1038/s41598-017-10669-4 )) by using the same ecologically valid paradigm in an independent sample with similar age ranges. We were able to replicate the previously observed results of a preservation or even enhancement in socio-affective processes, but a decline in socio-cognitive processes for older adults. Our findings add to the understanding of how social affect and cognition change across the adult lifespan and may suggest targets for intervention studies aiming to foster successful social interactions and well-being until advanced old age.

Emotional empathy across adulthood: A meta-analytic review.

“…First, except for seven studies (Y.-C. Chen et al, 2014Chen et al, , 2018Chopik et al, 2017;Hsu et al, 2023;Khanjani et al, 2015;Li & Siu, 2021;Takahashi & Overton, 2002), all others were representative of western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries, calling into question the generalizability of these results to non-WEIRD samples. Given that empathy has been suggested to be dependent on cultural norms (Chopik et al, 2017;Stietz et al, 2021), this is a significant limitation of current knowledge. It is worth noting that since all non-English studies were excluded, this could have contributed to the lack of WEIRD samples included in this meta-analysis.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, no meta-analysis to date has explored the relationship between emotional empathy and age in healthy adult samples. Mixed evidence currently exists, with studies identifying that emotional empathy in later life (a) declines (Albouy & Décaudin, 2018; Y.-C. Chen et al, 2014; O’Brien et al, 2013; Sommerlad et al, 2021), (b) increases (Kelly et al, 2022; Khanjani et al, 2015; Sun et al, 2018; Sze et al, 2012; Yaghoubi Jami et al, 2021), and (c) does not change (Bailey et al, 2008; Beadle et al, 2015; Kelly et al, 2022; Stietz et al, 2021).…”

Heterogeneous factors influence social cognition across diverse settings in brain health and age-related diseases

“…Future studies should incorporate more naturalistic stimuli (76). Also, other social cognition components [such as empathy and compassion (77)] should be investigated in older adults. Second, we included only a limited number of countries with unbalanced number of participants, reducing the possibilities for crosscountry interpretations.…”

Gender differences in empathy, compassion, and prosocial donations, but not theory of mind in a naturalistic social task

“…Differences and similarities between the datasets are summarized in Table . 1. Dataset 1 (D1) is from a published functional imaging study examining differences in social abilities between young and elderly adults 63 . The data for D1 are available at https:// doi.…”