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.

Keywords: affective empathy; cognitive empathy; emotional closeness; empathy; hormonal status; oral contraceptives.

FIGURE 1

Empathy task design—Tübinger Empathy Test (TET). Each emotional scenario (textual depiction) was presented from three perspectives: the self, friend, and enemy. For each perspective, there were six items per emotion (i.e., happiness, sexual pleasure, gratefulness, anger, disgust, and fear). After a fixed duration of 5 s (s), participants gave a cognitive rating (i.e., how the target person would feel in such a situation) on a visual analog scale ranging from very negative to very positive. The rating time was unlimited. After a response is given a new trial starts in the self-perspective block, whereas in the friend and enemy-perspective block a second, unlimited rating for the affective component (i.e., how does the participant feel, when this happens to the target person) was presented before a new trial started. The self-ratings were used as a predictor for the cognitive and affective ratings of the other two perspectives in order to compute empathic responsiveness in the form of standardized regression coefficients.

FIGURE 2

Bar chart depicting the empathic responsiveness (measured by standardized regression coefficients) for cognitive empathy (left half) and affective empathy (right half) for each hormonal status group [i.e., OC—oral contraceptive users (blue), fNC—naturally cycling women in early follicular phase (magenta) and oNC—naturally cycling women in periovulatory phase (light green)] divided up into the friend and enemy perspectives. Error bars with 1 SE. *p < 0.05, ***p < 0.001.

FIGURE 3

Bar chart depicting the response times (in ms) for cognitive ratings (left half) and affective ratings (right half) for each hormonal status group [i.e., OC—oral contraceptive users (blue), fNC—naturally cycling women in early follicular phase (magenta) and oNC—naturally cycling women in periovulatory phase (light green)] divided up into the friend and enemy perspectives. Error bars with 1 SE. ***p < 0.001.