Empathy Across the Ages: "I May Be Older But I'm Still Feeling It"

Objective: Empathy is the ability to understand and respond to another person's experience and is an important skill for maintaining good relationships across the lifespan. Past research has predominately relied on self-report measures of trait empathy in examining the impact of ageing on empathy, potentially contributing to the very mixed findings in this area. We aimed to examine the effects of age on state empathic ability. Method: Two-hundred and thirty-one adults aged 17-94 years were administered behavioral measures of cognitive and affective empathy alongside traditional trait measures. We also examined the potential impact of advancing age on inhibition of self-relevant information and the relationship between this and the cognitive, affective and motivational components of empathic ability. Results: Age was not a predictor of either trait cognitive or affective empathy measured using self-report. Further, older adults did not perform worse than younger adults on a state behavioral measure of affective empathy. Older adults did perform less accurately on some behavioral cognitive empathy tasks and also on self-relevant inhibition. Self-relevant inhibition errors and response times were negatively associated with performance on cognitive empathy tasks, though not associated with self-report or behaviorally measured affective empathy scores. Further, mediation analyses suggested the indirect effect from age-inhibition-cognitive empathy was small but significant, implicating inhibition in cognitive empathy ability in older adulthood. Conclusions: The relationship between advancing age and empathic skills is complex, with age possibly conferring both advantages and disadvantages. Inhibition should be examined alongside other general cognitive skills in future studies investigating empathy using behavioural measures.