Friend vs. Foe: Cognitive and Affective Empathy in Women With Different Hormonal States

Abstract

Empathy is crucial for social functioning as well as social coherence. It can be influenced by modulatory factors such as familiarity and liking (i.e., emotional closeness). Furthermore, there are first hints that hormonal status may modulate affective but not cognitive empathy in women. The aim of this study was to investigate potential separate as well as combined modulatory effects of emotional closeness and hormonal status on female cognitive and affective empathy. Three hormonal status groups of women (n = 62) were studied: (1) naturally-cycling (NC) women in the early follicular phase (fNC), (2) NC women during periovulatory phase (oNC), and (3) oral contraceptive (OC) users. All women underwent a newly developed empathy task (i.e., Tübinger Empathy Test, TET) presenting textual descriptions of positive and negative emotional scenes relating to three different perspectives (i.e., self vs. friend vs. enemy/disliked person). Regardless of hormonal status, empathic responses were higher for the friend compared to the enemy perspective for both empathy components. However, cognitive empathy was less affected by varying emotional closeness toward the target person than affective empathy. Hormonal status modulated only affective empathy. OC users showed significantly less affective empathy toward the enemy compared to the fNC women. Overall, affective empathy seems more sensitive to modulatory effects of emotional closeness and hormonal status than cognitive empathy. Possible implications of this current investigation for future research on empathy and OC use, contraceptive education as well as for other clinical applications are discussed.

Response of salivary biomarkers to an empathy triggering film sequence—a pilot study

“…Estradiol administration resulted in increased emotional reactivity in males in a double-blind placebo controlled study 22 . Consistently, hormonal status modulated affective empathy in women 23 . The use of oral contraceptives, and thus suppressed production of estradiol and progesterone has additionally been associated with decreased cognitive empathy 24 , 25 .…”

The Effects of the Creator’s Situation on Creativity Evaluation: The Rater’s Cognitive Empathy and Affective Empathy Matter in Rating Creative Works

“…One possible explanation is the experience of positive emotions when seeing others in advantageous situations. Past studies have found that people easily experience positive empathy and a subsequent positive effect after reading textual descriptions of real-life emotional scenes ( Kimmig et al 2021 ; Telle and Pfister 2016 ). The study of Mastria et al ( 2019 ) also showed that this positive emotion then associates with higher creative evaluation scores, with their findings depicting that people in positive states gave higher scores to creative products.…”

No Differences in Value-Based Decision-Making Due to Use of Oral Contraceptives

“…After we received written informed consent from participants, we checked all inclusion and exclusion criteria and asked for menstrual cycle features, OC intake history, as well as gynecological characteristics (e.g., premenstrual syndrome, pregnancies, endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome etc.). Thereafter, participants underwent the value-based decisionmaking battery (34), as well as two other behavioral tasks (Tübinger Empathy Test and a sexual approach avoidance task; reported in (41). The Ethics committee of the Medical Faculty of Tübingen approved the study.…”