Gaspar Augusta, Esteves Francisco
Católica Research Centre for Psychological-Family and Social Wellbeing, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon, Portugal.
Department of Psychology and Social Work, Mid Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden.
Front Psychol. 2022 Oct 10;13:936053. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.936053. eCollection 2022.
This research was conducted with two main goals-to contribute to knowledge on the development of empathy from early adolescence to adulthood, including its contribution to decoding emotion expression, and to improve the understanding of the nature of empathy by simultaneously assessing empathy toward two different targets-humans and animals. It unfolded into two cross-sectional studies: One (S1) obtaining measures of empathy toward humans and animals as targets across five age groups (from pre-adolescents to adults); and another (S2) where a subset of the adolescents who participated in S1 were assessed in emotion expression decoding and subjective and physiological responses to emotional video clips. The results of S1 showed that empathy toward animals and most dimensions of empathy toward humans increase toward adulthood, with important gender differences in empathy to animals and humans, and empathy levels in girls starting off in the age trajectory at higher levels, A moderate correlation between empathy toward human and toward animal targets was also found. S2 showed that the expression of positive emotion is better recognized than that of negative emotion, surprise, or neutral expression, and that the measure of human-directed empathy predicts successful decoding of negative emotion, whereas skin conductance responses (SCRs) and subjective valence ratings predicted successful identification of positive emotion. Gender differences emerged but not across all age groups nor all subscales. Results yield keys to the developmental "pace" and trajectory of the various dimensions of empathy and to how empathy relates to emotion decoding.
一是增进对从青少年早期到成年期共情发展的认识，包括其对解读情绪表达的贡献；二是通过同时评估对人类和动物这两种不同目标的共情，提高对共情本质的理解。该研究分为两项横断面研究：一项（S1）针对五个年龄组（从青春期前到成年人）获取以人类和动物为目标的共情测量数据；另一项（S2）对参与S1的部分青少年进行情绪表达解码以及对情感视频片段的主观和生理反应评估。S1的结果表明，对动物的共情以及对人类共情的大多数维度在成年期会增加，在对动物和人类的共情方面存在重要的性别差异，女孩的共情水平在年龄轨迹上起始较高，还发现对人类和动物目标的共情之间存在中度相关性。S2表明，积极情绪的表达比消极情绪、惊讶或中性表达更容易被识别，以人类为导向的共情测量可预测对消极情绪的成功解码，而皮肤电反应（SCR）和主观效价评分可预测对积极情绪的成功识别。出现了性别差异，但并非在所有年龄组和所有子量表中都存在。研究结果揭示了共情各维度的发展“速度”和轨迹，以及共情与情绪解码之间的关系。
