Here ’s how our ability to empathise changes as we get older

By Emma Young

How does age affect our ability to empathise? Some researchers think that our ability to understand and respond to others’ feelings follows an inverted U-shaped pattern, with empathic skills peaking in middle age before declining again in older age. But as Michelle Kelly at the University of Newcastle and colleagues point out in their paper in Neuropsychology, findings in this field have been mixed. Their new work, on 231 adults aged 17-94, suggests that while people aged over 65 aren’t quite as good at “cognitive empathy” (working out what someone is likely to be feeling), they are just as good at “feeling with” others.

The first two main tasks were designed to measure cognitive empathy. Participants were shown photos of faces and also videos of actors who’d been asked to convey various emotions. They had to identify the emotions being expressed, and decide whether pairs of images were showing matching or different emotions.

In a third task, they saw 19 images of people engaged in some kind of social encounter or activity. For each, they were asked questions related to cognitive empathy (e.g. what the main character was feeling); questions related to affective empathy (e.g. how affected they were by seeing the scene); and one question related to prosocial behaviour (whether they would do anything if they saw this happening in real life).

For the analysis, the team split the participants into three groups: young (ag...

Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - March 24, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Developmental Emotion Source Type: blogs