ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2023
Are women more empathetic than men? Questionnaire and EEG estimations of sex/gender differences in empathic ability.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evaluation of Dental Student Empathy Scores Using Cognitive and Effective Empathy Measures.Journal of dental education · 2026Article
- Modulating empathy with tDCS: dissociable roles of rTPJ and lDLPFC.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Learning by Doing: Chinese Male Nursing Students' Experiences of Developing and Demonstrating Empathy When Caring for Patients in the Oncology Wards.Nursing open · 2026Article
- Assessing self-reported empathy among chiropractic students at a South African university.The Journal of chiropractic education · 2026Article
- Can Brief Empathy Training Increase Sexual Harassment Bystander Intervention Intentions?Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Article
- The Moderating Effect of Sex on Autistic Trait Emotional Intelligence, Alexithymia, and Empathy.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Between scientific capital and emotional capital: a cross-sectional study on the empathetic clinical gaze in Swedish medical education.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Article
- It's what's inside that counts: how dark triad traits mediate gender differences in prosocial behavior.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- The impact of sex on clinical profiles of patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2025Article
- Empathic Dimensions Influence Motor Resonance Magnitude During Transitive but Not Intransitive Action Observation: A Retrospective Investigation.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Empathy in dark and vulnerable personality traits: A multimethod study from self-reported, performance-based, and electrophysiological empathy correlates.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Factors Influencing Emergency Empathy Towards Patients and Their Relatives: A National Survey Study in Türkiye.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Influence of Lifestyle Habits on Psychological Well-Being of University Students: A Quantitative Cross-Sectional Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Perception of Empathy in Mental Health Care Through Voice-Based Conversational Agent Prototypes: Experimental Study.JMIR formative research · 2025Article
- Prevalence and associated factors of workplace violence among Chinese nurses in tertiary hospitals: a national cross-sectional study.BMC nursing · 2025Article
- The relationship between empathy and mental health: A mediation model via rumination and interpersonal competence.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Gender difference in self-reported empathy: Effects of task instructions and exposure to gender essentialism primes.PloS one · 2025Article
- Individual differences in vicarious pain as a shift in the self-other boundary.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- The Compassionate Engagement and Action Scale for Youths: psychometric properties in a clinical psychiatric Swedish sample.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
The debate regarding whether women are more empathetic than men has broad scientific, social and clinical implications. However, previous independent questionnaires and brain imaging studies that tested different samples reported inconsistent results regarding sex/gender differences in empathic ability. We conducted three studies to investigate sex/gender differences in empathic ability using large-sample questionnaires and electroencephalography (EEG) measures. We showed that the estimation of empathic ability using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index questionnaire showed higher rating scores in women than in men in all studies. However, our EEG measures of empathy, indexed by both phase-locked and non-phased-locked neural responses to others' painful (vs neutral) facial expressions, support a null hypothesis of the sex/gender difference in empathic ability. In addition, we showed evidence that priming social expectations of women and men's ability to share and care about others' feelings eliminated the sex/gender difference in questionnaire measures of empathic ability. Our large-sample EEG results challenge the notion of women's superiority in empathy that is built based on subjective questionnaire measures that are sensitive to social desirability. Our findings indicate that whether the notion of women's superiority in empathic ability reflects a biological/social difference between women and men or a gender-role stereotype remains an open question.
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