Culture, Sex, and Group-Bias in Trait and State Empathy

Abstract

Empathy is sharing and understanding others’ emotions. Recently, researchers identified a culture–sex interaction effect in empathy. This phenomenon has been largely ignored by previous researchers. In this study, the culture–sex interaction effect was explored with a cohort of 129 participants (61 Australian Caucasians and 68 Chinese Hans) using both self-report questionnaires (i.e., Empathy Quotient and Interpersonal Reactivity Index) and computer-based empathy tasks. In line with the previous findings, the culture–sex interaction effect was observed for both trait empathy (i.e., the generalized characteristics of empathy, as examined by the self-report questionnaires) and state empathy (i.e., the on-spot reaction of empathy for a specific stimulus, as evaluated by the computer-based tasks). Moreover, in terms of state empathy, the culture–sex interaction effect further interacted with stimulus traits (i.e., stimulus ethnicity, stimulus sex, or stimulus emotion) and resulted in three- and four-way interactions. Follow-up analyses of these higher-order interactions suggested that the phenomena of ethnic group bias and sex group favor in empathy varied among the four culture–sex participant groups (i.e., Australian female, Australian male, Chinese female, and Chinese male). The current findings highlighted the dynamic nature of empathy (i.e., its sensitivity toward both participant traits and stimulus features). Furthermore, the newly identified interaction effects in empathy deserve more investigation and need to be verified with other Western and Asian populations.

The Theories of the Development of Students: A Factor to Shape Teacher Empathy From the Perspective of Motivation

“…An internal consistency analysis revealed that the adapted scale of IRI has moderate reliability (α = 0.74). All the subscales of the IRI-CT demonstrated good internal consistencies (ranging from 0.57 to 0.71, see Table 1), which was consistent with other studies based on the Chinese versions of IRI (Zhao et al, 2021).…”

“…Future research needs to adopt multiple approaches (for example, a combination of online and offline surveys) to expand the number of subjects. Third, some cross-cultural studies show that there are cultural differences in empathy ( Zhao et al, 2019 , 2021 ). However, we did not collect information about the cultures (i.e., teachers’ perceived professional ethics, social expectation, and educational level) that may affect teacher empathy.…”

“…Data including demographic information, theories of the development of students, the empathetic motivation of teachers, and the subscales, such as TE-EC, TE-PT, TE-FS, and TE-PD were collected. The survey could not be submitted if any questions had not been answered, like other studies ( Zhao et al, 2021 ). Hence, there were no missing values.…”

“…First, SPSS (version 23.0) was used to calculate the descriptive statistics and partial correlations of crucial variables in this study. One recent cross-cultural study reported the culture-sex interaction effect for both trait and state empathy with Australian and Chinese subjects ( Zhao et al, 2021 ). Therefore, partial correlation analyses (i.e., to control for the following covariates: gender, age, teaching experience, and title) were conducted to examine the relationships between the theories of the development of students (TOS), the empathic motivation of teachers, teacher empathy (TE), the empathic concern of teacher empathy (TE-EC), the perspective-taking of teacher empathy (TE-PT), the fantasy of teacher empathy (TE-FS), and the personal distress of teacher empathy (TE-EC).…”

Validation of the Music Empathizing inventory in China

“…According to the E-S theory (Baron-Cohen, 2009), human brain types ranged on a spectrum from “extreme female brain” (i.e., empathizing; decoding the affective and psychological information of society members) to “extreme male brain” (i.e., systemizing; handling the physical and logical information of non-social objects). Empathy is an essential social skill (Zhao et al, 2021), and several mental disorders have comorbid empathy-related deficiencies (e.g., high functioning autism; Gleichgerrcht et al, 2012). To date, the knowledge of ME (the first and the only self-report scale of music empathy) has been restricted to Western cultures (Table 1).…”