ArticleBrain structure & function2021
Age-related differences in negative cognitive empathy but similarities in positive affective empathy.
Article in Brain structure & function, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 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.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Are Older Adults More Prosocial Than Younger Adults? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.The Gerontologist · 2024Pooled it
- Exploring Empathic Responses to Others' Positive and Negative Experiences: Insights from Empathy Subprocesses.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Seeing and deciding to help: neural and attentional mechanisms of prosociality in younger and older adults.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Increased functional integration of emotional control network across the adult lifespan.Aging brain · 2026Article
- Between scientific capital and emotional capital: a cross-sectional study on the empathetic clinical gaze in Swedish medical education.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Article
- Unveiling multi-level determinants on empathy among Chinese primary and secondary school students: evidence from SSES 2019.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Empathy and Autism: Establishing the Structure and Different Manifestations of Empathy in Autistic Individuals Using the Perth Empathy Scale.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2025Article
- Age-Related Increase in Locus Ceruleus Activity and Connectivity with the Prefrontal Cortex during Ambiguity Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Fractional Anisotropy of Cingulum Cingulate Mediates the Relationship Between Happiness and Work Performance in Healthy Individuals.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- Measuring cognitive and affective empathy across positive and negative emotions: psychometric properties and measurement invariance of the Perth Empathy Scale.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- The Perth Empathy Scale: Psychometric Properties of the Polish Version and Its Mental Health Correlates.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2023Article
- Sex difference in trait empathy is encoded in the human anterior insula.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Age differences in functional brain networks associated with loneliness and empathy.Network neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- Investigating the Relationship between Facial Mimicry and Empathy.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Investigating adult age differences in real-life empathy, prosociality, and well-being using experience sampling.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Affective and cognitive brain-networks are differently integrated in women and men while experiencing compassion.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Age-Related Differences in Amygdala Activation Associated With Face Trustworthiness but No Evidence of Oxytocin Modulation.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Impaired Cognitive Empathy in Outpatients with Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain: A Cross-Sectional Study.Neural plasticity · 2021Article
- Oxytocin neurons in the paraventricular nucleus and fear empathy among male mice.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPNArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Empathy, among other social-cognitive processes, changes across adulthood. More specifically, cognitive components of empathy (understanding another's perspective) appear to decline with age, while findings for affective empathy (sharing another's emotional state) are rather mixed. Structural and functional correlates underlying cognitive and affective empathy in aging and the extent to which valence affects empathic response in brain and behavior are not well understood yet. To fill these research gaps, younger and older adults completed a modified version of the Multifaceted Empathy Test, which measures both cognitive and affective empathy as well as empathic responding to both positive and negative stimuli (i.e., positive vs. negative empathy). Adopting a multimodal imaging approach and applying multivariate analysis, the study found that for cognitive empathy to negative emotions, regions of the salience network including the anterior insula and anterior cingulate were more involved in older than younger adults. For affective empathy to positive emotions, in contrast, younger and older adults recruited a similar brain network including main nodes of the default mode network. Additionally, increased structural microstructure (fractional anisotropy values) of the posterior cingulum bundle (right henisphere) was related to activation of default mode regions during affective empathy for positive emotions in both age groups. These findings provide novel insights into the functional networks subserving cognitive and affective empathy in younger and older adults and highlight the importance of considering valence in empathic response in aging research. Further this study, for the first time, underscores the role of the posterior cingulum bundle in higher-order social-cognitive processes such as empathy, specifically for positive emotions, in aging.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.