ReviewFrontiers in psychiatry2019
Impact of Aging on Empathy: Review of Psychological and Neural Mechanisms.
Review in Frontiers in psychiatry, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 54 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
54 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 131 citations in OpenAlex.
- Interventions Associated With Reduced Loneliness and Social Isolation in Older Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.JAMA network open · 2022Pooled it
- Predictive roles of empathy and ageism attitudes in nursing students' willingness to care for older adults.BMC nursing · 2026Article
- Seeing and deciding to help: neural and attentional mechanisms of prosociality in younger and older adults.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Age differences in neural discriminability of rumination and worry.Communications biology · 2026Article
- When the body resonates with the pain of the other: Empathy Bodyssence in Parkinson's disease.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Age-related differences in facial emotion recognition across adulthood: accuracy and confidence in the 30s, 50s, and 70s.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Psychometric Properties of the Arabic Version of the Pictorial Empathy Test for Assessing Affective Empathic Reactions in Patients with Schizophrenia.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Interplay of plasma Oxytocin and oxytocin receptor gene methylation levels on empathy in older adults.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The influence of age on brief motivational intervention for unhealthy alcohol use.Drug and alcohol dependence reports · 2025Article
- Empathy and Mentalizing of Mental Health Nurses: A Cross-Sectional Correlational Study.International journal of mental health nursing · 2025Observational
- Old but attuned: the ability to decode babies' cries does not decline with age.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Understanding empathy and theory of mind in Romanian dental students for improved educational strategies.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Empathy is associated with older adults' social behaviors and verbal emotional expressions throughout the day.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Effect of structured community-based older people education program on empathy, emotional intelligence, and caring behavior among nursing students.Frontiers in medicine · 2025Article
- Neural empathy mechanisms are shared for physical and social pain, and increase from adolescence to older adulthood.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Human Preferences for Dogs and Cats in China: The Current Situation and Influencing Factors of Watching Online Videos and Pet Ownership.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Genetic variations as predictors of dispositional and dyadic empathy-a couple study.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The Association Between Well-Being and Empathy in Medical Residents: A Cross-Sectional Survey.Journal of integrative and complementary medicine · 2024Article
- New directions for studying the aging social-cognitive brain.Current opinion in psychology · 2024Review
- The effect of psilocybin on empathy and prosocial behavior: a proposed mechanism for enduring antidepressant effects.Npj mental health research · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Empathy in aging is a key capacity because it affects the quality of older adults' relationships and reduced levels are associated with greater loneliness. Many older adults also find themselves in the role of a caregiver to a loved one, and thus empathy is critical for the success of the caregiver-patient relationship. Furthermore, older adults are motivated to make strong emotional connections with others, as highlighted in the socioemotional selectivity theory. Consequently, reductions in empathy could negatively impact their goals. However, there is growing evidence that older adults experience at least some changes in empathy, depending on the domain. Specifically, the state of the research is that older adults have lower cognitive empathy (i.e., the ability to understand others' thoughts and feelings) than younger adults, but similar and in some cases even higher levels of emotional empathy (i.e., the ability to feel emotions that are similar to others' or feel compassion for them). A small number of studies have examined the neural mechanisms for age-related differences in empathy and have found reduced activity in a key brain area associated with cognitive empathy. However, more research is needed to further characterize how brain changes impact empathy with age, especially in the emotional domain of empathy. In this review, we discuss the current state of the research on age-related differences in the psychological and neural bases of empathy, with a specific comparison of the cognitive versus emotional components. Finally, we highlight new directions for research in this area and examine the implications of age-related differences in empathy for older adults.
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Registered trials
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