Emotional Empathic Responses to Dynamic Negative Affective Stimuli Is Gender-Dependent
Empathy entails the ability to recognize emotional states in others and feel for them. Since empathy does not take place in a static setting, paradigms utilizing more naturalistic, dynamic stimuli instead of static stimuli are perhaps more suited to grasp the origin of this highly complex social ski...
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Published in | Frontiers in psychology Vol. 8; p. 1491 |
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Main Author | |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Switzerland
Frontiers Media S.A
31.08.2017
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Empathy entails the ability to recognize emotional states in others and feel for them. Since empathy does not take place in a static setting, paradigms utilizing more naturalistic, dynamic stimuli instead of static stimuli are perhaps more suited to grasp the origin of this highly complex social skill. The study was set up to test the effect of stimulus dynamics and gender on empathic responses. Participants were 80 healthy volunteers (
= 40 males) aged 22.5 years on average. Behavioral empathy was tested with the multifaceted empathy test, including static emotional stimuli, and the multidimensional movie empathy test (MMET), including dynamic stimuli. Findings showed emotional empathy (EE) responses were higher to negative emotional stimuli in both tasks, i.e., using static as well as dynamic stimuli. Interestingly a gender-dependent response was only seen in the MMET using dynamic stimuli. It was shown that females felt more aroused and were more concerned with people in negative affective states. It was concluded that the MMET is suited to study gender differences in EE. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 Edited by: Jean Decety, University of Chicago, United States This article was submitted to Emotion Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology Reviewed by: Yawei Cheng, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan; Michio Nomura, Kyoto University, Japan |
ISSN: | 1664-1078 1664-1078 |
DOI: | 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01491 |