A recent meta-analysis published in Psychology and Aging revealed higher levels of emotional empathy in older adults compared to younger adults.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, a quality fundamental to human social interaction. While cognitive empathy refers to the ability to infer another’s emotional state, emotional empathy captures the emotional response to it. Some studies suggest that emotional empathy declines with age, while others indicate an increase or no significant change.
Socioemotional selectivity theory posits that older adults prioritize emotionally meaningful goals, potentially leading to heightened emotional empathy. In contrast, dynamic integration theory suggests that cognitive declines in later life might negatively impact emotional functioning, including empathy.
Amy L. Jarvis and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis to clarify these conflicting findings by examining the relationship between age and emotional empathy using data from multiple studies and various emotional empathy measures.
The researchers searched four major databases, including Embase, APA PsycInfo, Medline, and Scopus—up to October 2022 to identify relevant studies on emotional empathy and age. From an initial pool of 8,782 articles, 6,199 titles and abstracts were screened for eligibility after duplicates were removed. Next, 440 full-text articles were assessed, resulting in the final inclusion of 43 studies that met the criteria for the meta-analysis.
To be included, studies required original empirical data, be published in English, and include healthy younger (≤59 years old) and older adults (≥60 years old) without diagnosed psychiatric or neurological disorders.
Eligible studies had to employ validated measures of emotional empathy that aligned with a specific definition emphasizing congruent emotional responses to another’s emotional state.
The final sample consisted of 33 studies that compared categorical age differences in emotional empathy and 7 studies that examined emotional empathy across a continuous age range. The categorical analysis included 24,353 younger adults and 10,327 older adults while the continuous age analysis included 108,566 adults aged 18 to 100 years.
Jarvis and colleagues found that older adults demonstrated higher emotional empathy compared to younger adults, with a small but statistically significant effect size. This finding supports the socioemotional selectivity theory, suggesting that older adults may focus more on emotionally meaningful interactions, enhancing their emotional empathy. A positive correlation between age and emotional empathy was also observed when age was treated as a continuous variable, further indicating that emotional empathy may increase with age.
Further analyses showed that the type of measure (state vs. trait) did not significantly affect the age-emotional empathy relationship. However, the specific measures used did influence the results. For example, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) Personal Distress subscale indicated a decline in emotional empathy with age, while the IRI Empathic Concern subscale showed no significant age differences.
Emotional Congruence measures, which assess congruent emotional responses, generally indicated an increase in emotional empathy with age. These findings highlight the importance of the specific instruments used.
One limitation is the predominance of cross-sectional designs in the included studies, which cannot definitively establish whether observed age-related differences in emotional empathy are due to actual changes over time or cohort effects.
The study, “Emotional empathy across adulthood: A meta-analytic review”, was authored by Amy L. Jarvis, Stephanie Wong, Michael Weightman, Erica S. Ghezzi, Rhianna L. S. Sharman, and Hannah A. D. Keage.