Lack of Interaction Motivation in Older Adults Automatically Reduces Cognitive Empathy

ABSTRACT

Empathy, the ability to understand and respond to the experiences of others, is an important skill for maintaining good relationships throughout one’s life. Previous research indicated that emotional empathy remained stable or even increased in older adults compared to younger adults, while cognitive empathy showed age-related deficits. Based on the selective engagement hypothesis, this deficit was not caused by a decline in cognitive functioning, but by a lack of willingness to judge the target person’s emotions more precisely, that is, by a lack of interaction motivation. In order to provide more evidence on the causes of empathic aging in older adults, the current study investigated the influence of interaction motivation on empathy in older adults in an Eastern cultural context (China) based on the selective engagement hypothesis. This study used older adults and younger adults as subjects. Through two experiments, empathy was measured by the multiple empathy test (Experiment 1) and film tasks (Experiment 2); at the same time, use accountability instructions (Experiment 1), the age-related events (Experiment 2) to manipulate interaction motivation. The results showed that emotional empathy was significantly higher in older adults than in younger adults, regardless of whether interaction motivation was elicited. In terms of cognitive empathy, when there is no motivation, the cognitive empathy of older adults is significantly lower than that of younger adults. When the interaction motivation is stimulated, the cognitive empathy of older adults is no less than that of younger adults. This suggested that empathic aging in older adults was not a permanent decline in cognitive empathy, but rather a decline in interaction motivation, supporting the selective engagement hypothesis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank the participants who participated in the study. This research is supported by the Open Research Fund of College of Teacher Education, Zhejiang Normal University (No. jykf20068)