Kimmig Ann-Christin Sophie, Wildgruber Dirk, Wendel Sina-Maria Ute, Sundström-Poromaa Inger, Derntl Birgit
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
International Max Planck Research School for Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Front Neurosci. 2021 Mar 8;15:608768. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2021.608768. eCollection 2021.
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 ( = 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.
共情对于社会功能以及社会凝聚力至关重要。它会受到诸如熟悉程度和喜爱程度（即情感亲密度）等调节因素的影响。此外，有初步迹象表明，激素状态可能会调节女性的情感共情而非认知共情。本研究的目的是调查情感亲密度和激素状态对女性认知共情和情感共情潜在的单独以及联合调节作用。研究了三组激素状态的女性（n = 62）：（1）处于卵泡早期的自然周期（NC）女性（fNC），（2）排卵期的NC女性（oNC），以及（3）口服避孕药（OC）使用者。所有女性都接受了一项新开发的共情任务（即图宾根共情测试，TET），该任务呈现了与三种不同视角（即自我、朋友、敌人/讨厌的人）相关的积极和消极情感场景的文字描述。无论激素状态如何，对于两种共情成分，朋友视角的共情反应均高于敌人视角。然而，与情感共情相比，认知共情受对目标人物情感亲密度变化的影响较小。激素状态仅调节情感共情。与fNC女性相比，OC使用者对敌人表现出明显更少的情感共情。总体而言，情感共情似乎比认知共情对情感亲密度和激素状态的调节作用更敏感。讨论了本研究对未来共情与OC使用研究、避孕教育以及其他临床应用可能产生的影响。
