Empathic Accuracy: Helpful to Avoid Negative Affect in Old Age?

Positive and negative affect in very old age.

The current study examined two issues involving the relationship between age and affect in very old age using data from men and women (aged 70 to 100+ years, M = 85 years) in the Berlin Aging Study (BASE). The first issue was whether unique effects of age on positive and negative affect remained after we controlled for other variables that would be expected to relate to affect in late life. We ...

Empathic Accuracy

People are motivated to understand each other's psychological states as well as each other's personality traits. As a consequence, the more traditional study of accuracy in trait inference can be complemented by, and potentially benefit from, the insights provided by the more recent study of empathic accuracy. Findings in this area suggest that future research should devote more attention to (a...

Testosterone’s Negative Relationship With Empathic Accuracy and Perceived Leadership Ability

Two studies examine the relationship between naturally occurring levels of circulating testosterone and empathic accuracy. In Study 1, the authors find that higher endogenous levels of testosterone are negatively related to the accuracy with which people infer the thoughts and feelings of others. In Study 2, the authors use 360 data collected in the field to show that individuals with higher le...

Affective development in advanced old age: analyses of terminal change in positive and negative affect.

Late-life development of affect may unfold terminal changes that are driven more by end-of-life processes and not so much by time since birth. This study aimed to explore time-to-death-related effects in measures of affect in a sample of the very old. We used longitudinal data (2 measurement occasions: 2002 and 2003) from 140 deceased participants, covering a period of up to 9 years to death, f...

Oxytocin selectively improves empathic accuracy.