ArticleScientific reports2022
Investigating adult age differences in real-life empathy, prosociality, and well-being using experience sampling.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Are Older Adults More Prosocial Than Younger Adults? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.The Gerontologist · 2024Pooled it
- Age moderates the association between helping and meaning in daily life.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- How Individual Differences in Empathy Predict Moments of Empathy in Everyday Life.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2026Article
- Moral Disengagement Mechanisms in Image-Based Sexual Abuse Against Women: The Role of Age and Gender.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Age-related differences in facial emotion recognition across adulthood: accuracy and confidence in the 30s, 50s, and 70s.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Empathy and validation in chronic pain couples: a systematic review.Pain reports · 2025Review
- 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
- Empathy and citizen's social-political attitude: age as a moderator.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Theater-based interventions as a means of reducing social isolation and loneliness, facilitating successful aging, and strengthening social cognition in older adults.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Article
- Cognitive effort for self, strangers, and charities.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Investigating the Relationship between Facial Mimicry and Empathy.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While the importance of social affect and cognition is indisputable throughout the adult lifespan, findings of how empathy and prosociality develop and interact across adulthood are mixed and real-life data are scarce. Research using ecological momentary assessment recently demonstrated that adults commonly experience empathy in daily life. Furthermore, experiencing empathy was linked to higher prosocial behavior and subjective well-being. However, to date, it is not clear whether there are adult age differences in daily empathy and daily prosociality and whether age moderates the relationship between empathy and prosociality across adulthood. Here we analyzed experience-sampling data collected from participants across the adult lifespan to study age effects on empathy, prosocial behavior, and well-being under real-life circumstances. Linear and quadratic age effects were found for the experience of empathy, with increased empathy across the three younger age groups (18 to 45 years) and a slight decrease in the oldest group (55 years and older). Neither prosocial behavior nor well-being showed significant age-related differences. We discuss these findings with respect to (partially discrepant) results derived from lab-based and traditional survey studies. We conclude that studies linking in-lab experiments with real-life experience-sampling may be a promising venue for future lifespan studies.
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