Stress and Stress-induced Glucocorticoids Facilitate Empathic Accuracy in Men, with no Effects for Women

Abstract

Empathy, the ability to understand what others are feeling, is critical for social connection and navigating our social world. We investigated the effects of acute stress on cognitive empathy. Given that acute stress, and resulting increased glucocorticoid, triggers a shift in two large-scale brain networks, prioritizing the salience over the executive control network, we predicted that stress would facilitate empathic accuracy (EA). We also investigated the effect of gender/sex, given evidence of differential stress reactivity. Results from two independent studies (N= 267; 2,256 observations) showed that acute stress facilitated EA for men, an effect that was partly driven by their glucocorticoid response. Conversely, stress had no effect for women, who also slowed a blunted cortisol response. Moreover, exploratory analyses revealed that women taking oral contraceptives, in general, performed worse on the EA task than regularly cycling women. This research highlights the important, but complex, role of stress in cognitive empathy.