ArticlePloS one2017
Men, women…who cares? A population-based study on sex differences and gender roles in empathy and moral cognition.
Article in PloS one, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 69 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
69 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Empathy in Adults with Acquired Brain Injury: a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Neuropsychology review · 2026Pooled it
- Support for Human and Civil Rights in Physical Disability, Mental Illness, and Substance Use Disorder.JAMA health forum · 2026Article
- Empathy profiles in posttraumatic stress disorder: A person-centered approach to understanding emotion dysregulation and psychopathology.Journal of affective disorders · 2026Article
- The Role of Parenting Styles and Empathy in the Perpetration of Cyberbullying in a Sample of Adolescents.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Whose Authority? Re-Examining the Conceptualization of Authority Transfer Relationships.Archives of sexual behavior · 2026Article
- Facial emotion recognition, empathy & psychopathic traits: understanding differential effects of measures.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Assessing empathy in adults: A Malay language validation and measurement invariance of the Empathy Quotient (M-EQ).PloS one · 2026Article
- Empathic Dimensions Influence Motor Resonance Magnitude During Transitive but Not Intransitive Action Observation: A Retrospective Investigation.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Characteristics of vicarious touch reports in a general population.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Unveiling the Role of Theory of Mind: Neural Response to Emotional Stimuli in Context.Affective science · 2025Article
- A longitudinal neuroimaging study of adolescent girls' mentalizing and perspective-taking tendencies.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Reviving-like prosocial behavior in response to unconscious or dead conspecifics in rodents.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Gender difference in self-reported empathy: Effects of task instructions and exposure to gender essentialism primes.PloS one · 2025Article
- Mental Health Awareness: Stigma and Help-Seeking Among Portuguese College Students.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Do Danish medical students feel prepared to deliver healthcare to patients with backgrounds different from their own? A cross-sectional survey.BMC medical education · 2024Article
- Biomarkers of neurodegeneration across the Global South.The lancet. Healthy longevity · 2024Review
- Autistic People's Experience of Empathy and the Autistic Empathy Deficit Narrative.Autism in adulthood · 2024Article
- Does Medical Curriculum Impact on Empathy? A Longitudinal Study in a Sample of Undergraduate Medical Students.Medical science educator · 2024Article
- The Greek Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Medical Student Version (JSE-S): Psychometric Properties and Its Associated Factors.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Neuronal, affective, and sensory correlates of targeted helping behavior in male and female Sprague Dawley rats.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
9 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Research on sex differences in empathy has revealed mixed findings. Whereas experimental and neuropsychological measures show no consistent sex effect, self-report data consistently indicates greater empathy in women. However, available results mainly come from separate populations with relatively small samples, which may inflate effect sizes and hinder comparability between both empirical corpora. To elucidate the issue, we conducted two large-scale studies. First, we examined whether sex differences emerge in a large population-based sample (n = 10,802) when empathy is measured with an experimental empathy-for-pain paradigm. Moreover, we investigated the relationship between empathy and moral judgment. In the second study, a subsample (n = 334) completed a self-report empathy questionnaire. Results showed some sex differences in the experimental paradigm, but with minuscule effect sizes. Conversely, women did portray themselves as more empathic through self-reports. In addition, utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas were less frequent in women, although these differences also had small effect sizes. These findings suggest that sex differences in empathy are highly driven by the assessment measure. In particular, self-reports may induce biases leading individuals to assume gender-role stereotypes. Awareness of the role of measurement instruments in this field may hone our understanding of the links between empathy, sex differences, and gender roles.
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