Sadness, Gender and Empathy

The empathic practitioner: empathy, gender, and medicine

presumed to hold. Historians can work only with the published Minutes, and other official documents. The GMC and its members have published a number of accounts of the Council's work and history during this century, but a definitive history of the Council and its relationship to the wider history of medicine remains to be written. Russell Smith's book is, however, a large step in this direction...

The role of automaticity and attention in neural processes underlying empathy for happiness, sadness, and anxiety

Although many studies have examined the neural basis of empathy, relatively little is known about how empathic processes are affected by different attentional conditions. Thus, we examined whether instructions to empathize might amplify responses in empathy-related regions and whether cognitive load would diminish the involvement of these regions. Thirty-two participants completed a functional ...

Gender differences in regional cerebral activity during sadness.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging and echo-planar-imaging were used to investigate affect related gender differences in regional cerebral activity. The experiment was conducted using a standardized mood induction procedure. Blood-oxygen-level-dependent effect was measured in 13 male and 13 female healthy subjects, during both moods of happiness and sadness, respectively. Parallel to earlier...

Processing of observed pupil size modulates perception of sadness and predicts empathy.

Facial autonomic responses may contribute to emotional communication and reveal individual affective style. In this study, the authors examined how observed pupillary size modulates processing of facial expression, extending the finding that incidentally perceived pupils influence ratings of sadness but not those of happy, angry, or neutral facial expressions. Healthy subjects rated the valence...

The Impact of Gender on Empathy