Toccaceli Virgilia, Fagnani Corrado, Eisenberg Nancy, Alessandri Guido, Vitale Augusto, Stazi Maria Antonietta
Center for Behavioral Sciences and Mental Health,Italian National Institute of Health,Rome,Italy.
Department of Psychology,Arizona State University,Tempe,Arizona,USA.
Twin Res Hum Genet. 2018 Jun;21(3):214-226. doi: 10.1017/thg.2018.19. Epub 2018 Apr 15.
Empathy plays a central role in prosocial behavior and human cooperation. Very few twin researchers have investigated innate and environmental effects in adult empathy, and twin research on gender differences in these effects is sparse. The goal of this study was to examine innate and environmental influences on three components of an empathy scale frequently used with adults - the expression of cognitive (CE), emotional (EE), and social skills (SS) empathy - and to explore gender differences in the influences. Study participants were ~1,700 twins (18-65 years) enrolled in the Italian Twin Registry. Empathy was assessed with the Italian version of the Empathy Quotient (EQ), for which the three-factor structure (i.e., CE, EE, and SS) was confirmed. Twin correlations in monozygotic and dizygotic pairs, and males and females were estimated for the total EQ and subscale scores, and univariate genetic model fitting was carried out. Women's empathy (i.e., total EQ as well as CE and EE subdimensions) was predominantly driven by genetic factors and individual experiences, whereas for males, no genetic contribution or important shared and individual environmental effects emerged. Although of large magnitude, the gender differences did not reach statistical significance. Age did not moderate empathy heritability in adulthood. Only for the SS subscale were genetic and environmental proportions of variance similar for men and women. This study suggests possible gender-specific innate and environmental influences on empathy and its cognitive and emotional components that need to be confirmed in future studies.
同理心在亲社会行为和人类合作中起着核心作用。很少有双胞胎研究人员调查过成人同理心的先天和环境影响，关于这些影响中性别差异的双胞胎研究也很稀少。本研究的目的是检验对成人常用的同理心量表的三个组成部分——认知（CE）、情感（EE）和社交技能（SS）同理心的表达——的先天和环境影响，并探讨这些影响中的性别差异。研究参与者是~1700名登记在意大利双胞胎登记处的双胞胎（18 - 65岁）。使用意大利版的同理心商数（EQ）评估同理心，其三维结构（即CE、EE和SS）得到了确认。对同卵双胞胎和异卵双胞胎对、男性和女性的总EQ和子量表得分进行了双胞胎相关性估计，并进行了单变量遗传模型拟合。女性的同理心（即总EQ以及CE和EE子维度）主要由遗传因素和个人经历驱动，而对于男性，未发现遗传贡献或重要的共享和个人环境影响。尽管性别差异幅度较大，但未达到统计学意义。年龄并未调节成年期同理心的遗传率。仅对于SS子量表，男性和女性的遗传和环境方差比例相似。本研究表明，同理心及其认知和情感成分可能存在特定性别的先天和环境影响，需要在未来研究中加以证实。
