Department of Psychology, McGill University, Canada.
Department of Psychology, McGill University, Canada.
Horm Behav. 2020 Mar;119:104648. doi: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2019.104648. Epub 2019 Dec 6.
Empathy is a cornerstone of human sociality. It has important consequences for our interpersonal relationships and for navigating our social world more generally. Although research has identified numerous psychological factors that can influence empathy, evidence suggests that empathy may also be rooted in our biology and, in particular, the gonadal steroid hormone testosterone. To date, much of the research linking testosterone and empathy has focused on the 2D:4D ratio (i.e., the ratio of the lengths of the index and ring fingers), and the results have been mixed. These mixed results, however, may be due to reliance on self-report measures to assess empathy, which can be vulnerable to self-presentation, as well as social-cultural norms about gender/sex differences in empathy. Moreover, although some have argued that digit ratio is an indicator of prenatal androgen exposure, the evidence for this to date is weak. Here, we aimed to follow up on this prior work, using a naturalistic empathic accuracy task in which participants dynamically track, in real-time, the emotional state of targets. We show that lower digit ratio (Study 1; N = 107) and higher circulating testosterone (Study 2; N = 76) are associated with poorer empathic accuracy performance; critically, these effects hold when controlling for sex/gender. In neither study, however, did we find effects on self-reported empathy. Our results highlight the limitations of self-report measures and support the notion that endogenous testosterone levels as well as 2D:4D ratio are related to key social-cognitive competencies like empathic accuracy.
同理心是人类社会性的基石。它对我们的人际关系和更广泛的社交世界有重要影响。尽管研究已经确定了许多可以影响同理心的心理因素，但有证据表明，同理心也可能根植于我们的生物学，特别是性腺类固醇激素睾丸素。迄今为止，将睾丸素和同理心联系起来的研究大多集中在 2D:4D 比率（即食指和无名指的长度比）上，结果喜忧参半。然而，这些混杂的结果可能是由于依赖自我报告来评估同理心，而自我报告可能容易受到自我表现的影响，以及社会文化对同理心的性别差异的规范的影响。此外，尽管有人认为数字比率是产前雄激素暴露的指标，但迄今为止，这方面的证据还很薄弱。在这里，我们旨在跟进这项先前的工作，使用一种自然主义的同理心准确性任务，参与者在该任务中实时动态地跟踪目标的情绪状态。我们表明，较低的数字比率（研究 1；N=107）和较高的循环睾丸激素（研究 2；N=76）与较差的同理心准确性表现相关；至关重要的是，当控制性别时，这些影响仍然存在。然而，在这两项研究中，我们都没有发现对自我报告的同理心的影响。我们的结果突出了自我报告测量的局限性，并支持了内源性睾丸激素水平以及 2D:4D 比率与同理心准确性等关键社会认知能力相关的观点。
