Gender differences in affective sharing and self–other distinction during empathic neural responses to others’ sadness

Abstract

Self-other distinction, the separation between self and other, is a prerequisite for empathy through which individuals share another individual's feelings. Prior research suggests that females are better at recognizing and sharing others' emotions, whereas males perform better at self-other distinction. It is unclear, however, whether this superiority in the self-other distinction occurs in males throughout the experience of empathy or only at some stages of the empathic process. The present study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate this issue. In two separate experimental tasks, subjects were instructed to either judge the emotions shown on a face (other-task) or evaluate their own affective responses to the emotions shown on a face (self-task). The results of the other-task revealed that unlike males, females displayed increased P2 (190-240 ms) amplitudes to sad expressions compared with neutral expressions. This finding might be associated with an improved ability to recognize and share the emotions of others in females. In contrast, only males exhibited larger P2 amplitudes to sad expressions compared with neutral expressions during the self-task. This awareness of one's own emotions in response to another individual might reflect a distinction between the self and the other at an early stage in males. At the late cognitive controlled stage, gender differences became weak. However, the emotion effects in each task for both genders were positively correlated with self-reported cognitive empathy, which was indexed by the perspective taking (PT) and fantasy (FS) subscale, but not with affective empathy.

Competitive Intensity Modulates the Pain Empathy Response: An Event-Related Potentials Study

“…Previous studies suggest that, compared with neutral stimuli, negative stimuli would recruit more physiological and psychological resources due to the evaluation of evolutionary importance ( Yuan et al, 2007 ). Thus, negative stimuli elicit larger LPP amplitudes than neutral stimuli ( Luo et al, 2013 , 2015 ). Our results are consistent with these previous studies and indicate that empathic response could be found within three competitive intensity contexts at late cognitive controlled stage.…”

“…Previous studies have indicated that empathy for pain include an early emotional sharing component (N2) and a late cognitive evaluation component (LPP) ( Luo et al, 2015 ; Cheadle, 2017). Moreover, grand averaged waveforms and topographical map of ERPs (see Figure 2 ) showed that those elicited by pain pictures and non-pain pictures in different competitive intensities were different and these differences were largest at frontal, central, and parietal sites.…”

“…According to previous studies ( Decety et al, 2010 ; Luo et al, 2015 ), the pain empathy response is indexed by pain and no-pain differentiation. The early empathic N2 component is supposed to be automatic, bottom-up driven and more dependent on the context or characteristic of stimulus ( Fan and Han, 2008 ).…”

The eyes test is influenced more by artistic inclination and less by sex

“…We can speculate that the gender effects observed in solving the RMET are due to higher empathy levels in women than in men. Indeed, previous studies found that women were better at recognizing and sharing others’ emotions (Luo et al, 2014 ; Van der Graaff et al, 2014 ). Moreover, women showed also more often than men an empathizing style as reported by Billington et al ( 2007 ), therefore it becomes difficult to disentangle the role of sex and the role of a higher level of empathy.…”

Gender-specific differences in nursing staff’s administration patterns of ‘pro re nata’ medication: A prospective observational study

“…It is assumed to be one of the main motivators for prosocial behaviour [21][22][23]. Since previous studies offer evidence for a correlation between gender and empathy [22,24,25], we performed an observational study to test the hypothesis that female nurses give higher amounts of PRN medication due to stronger affective empathy and emotional responsivity to other's pain and discomfort compared to men. The knowledge about gender-specific trends in the treatment of ICU patients may help to sensitize staff for personal medication patterns aimed at improving the quality of PRN medication therapy.…”