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Reflections May 2013

Aid for Age

Who’s Most Empathic?

By Tait Trussell

Experiments at three universities have come up with the same conclusion: Middle-aged women showed empathy more than people either younger or older. The sample was national in scope.

Researchers from the University of Michigan, University of Rochester Medical Center, and North Carolina State University looked at samples of Americans between the ages of 18 and 90. In all three samples the researchers found a U-shaped pattern across the span of ages. Middle-aged adults, particularly women, reported the highest level of empathy.

Empathy is generally described as the disposition to “experience perspectives and feelings more congruent with another’s situation” than their own.

Previous research focused, the researchers said, on its prosocial aspects both for themself and others. For example, people who reported higher empathy also reported higher satisfaction with their own lives, emotional intelligence, and self-esteem.

Earlier studies also found empathic individuals to have richer social networks, are less aggressive, volunteer more, donate more to charity, and are more likely to help others. Previous research has not — to the extent that empathy facilitates the desirable outcomes mentioned above – measured how empathy varied across the life span, as the new research does.

Given other research that suggests empathetic responses and prosocial behavior, such as volunteer work and donating to charities, are associated with psychological and health benefits, the understanding of how empathy rises and falls “may have important health implications for a rising population” of this age category.

Emotional functions should show increases early in life because of cognitive development. They should show more increases in middle life, the researchers said, because of an accumulation of life experiences.

“In old age, however,” the researchers said, “age-related declines in biological and cognitive developments may challenge adequate emotional representations.”

Personally, I have found without a national sample that most old guys like me whom I know from my Bible study classes and weekly breakfast confabs (mainly the same people) treat me with more than adequate empathy or sympathy, maybe because I am the oldest of the gang and the least steady on my pegs. I get quite a few laughs from my wisecracks, which also helps the relationships.

The researchers theorized that the most empathetic may have been influenced by the period during which they grew up – when, for example, civil rights were being won by African Americans.

As for the youngest group, “young adults in our samples report higher levels of narcissism and materialism...negatively linked to empathy and social behavior.”

 

Tait Trussell is an old guy and fourth-generation professional journalist who writes extensively about aging issues among a myriad of diverse topics.

Meet Tait