健康与遗传心理学研究室知识库

共情是准确推断他人特定想法和感受的一种能力，在社会互动和社会理解中发挥关键作用，可能是成功老龄化的标志。老龄化问题日益严重，代际差异带来的社会矛盾不断增加。老年人共情能力己成为研究热点，但在理论和实践研究中都存在争论。社会情绪选择理论认为随着年龄增加，老年人的共情能力尤其是情绪共情能力应该保持稳定或上升，但老化脑理论认为随着相关脑区的老化，老年人共情能力下降。过去研究并未有一致性结果，且往往忽略情境因素对共情年龄差异的影响，而在现实生活中，个体面对的共情事件往往包含了复杂的情境因素，可分为主体因素、主客体关系因素以及环境因素等等。基于此，本研究采用行为实验与ERP研究相结合的方式研究共情的年龄效应，以及情境因素的影响，选取并考察3个有代表性的情境因素，即主体内因素的观察者性别、环境因素的观察者认知负荷和主客体关系因素中的年龄相似性。本研究包括四项实验，具体如下。
研究一测量疼痛共情年龄差异，发现青年人与老年人在两项测验中表现不一致。老年人工R工人际反应指数问卷的幻想和共情关注得分显著低于青年人;疼痛场景评价任务相似维度得分，两者无显著差异。
研究二、研究三探讨情境因素影响共情年龄效应的ERP实验。研究二探索疼痛共情年龄效应的性别差异，发现在早期情绪共情阶段，男女性老年人表现不同，即老年女性的情绪共情能力与青年人保持相当水平，而老年男性的情绪共情能力显著下降;老年男性与女性的认知共情水平普遍下降，无性别差异。
研究三探讨在高低不同认知负荷条件下疼痛共情年龄效应的差异，发现不同水平认知负荷在老年人的情绪共情阶段有差异，认知共情阶段无差异，在青年人的认知共情阶段有差异，情绪共情阶段无差异。即认知负荷影响老年人的情绪共情，青年人的认知共情。
研究四是共情对象年龄相似性对共情的年龄差异造成影响，发现年龄相似性导致的注意偏向仅体现在年青群体中，老年人同样表现出对年轻面孔的敏感性。
情境因素会对共情年龄效应产生影响，总体而言老年人情绪共情和认知共情能力较青年人都有所降低，但老年女性的情绪共情能力保持较好，认知负荷因素会影响青年人的认知共情和老年人的情绪共情，最后相似性仅对年青人产生影响。

Empathy is the ability to accurately infer the specific thoughts and feelings of others.It plays a key role in social interaction and social understanding, which may be a sign of successful aging. Given that the aging problem is becoming more and more serious nowadays, there are many social contradictions caused by intergenerational differences. The empathy of elders has become a research focus, but there is controversy among current researches. Socioemotional selectivity theory predicted that the empathy, especially the emotional empathy,would remain stable with the increase of age. But the brain-aging model indicated that the regions of brain related to empathy would atrophied with aging, so elders' empathy would decline as well. Previous researches often ignored the situational factors' influences on age differences of empathy. But in real life, events which individuals show empathy often contain complex situation factors, which can be divided into individual factors, environmental factors, and factors of the relationship between subject and pain demonstrator. Above all, this study conducted behavior experiments and ERP experiments to detect the age difference of empathy, and how situational factors affects the age difference of empathy. We selected three typical situational factors: gender is the individual factor of the observer; and cognitive load is the environmental factor; the age similarity is the relationship factor between observer and pain demonstrator. There were four experiments in this study.
Study 1 included two subjective measurements of age differences of pain empathy. The results of young participants and older participants in two measurements showed inconsistent results. In the interpersonal reaction index questionnaire, the elders' scores of both fantasy and empathy concern were significantly lower than young participants' scores. However, in pain evaluation task, the difference was not significant.
The study 2 and study 3 were ERP experiments investigating the influence of situational factors on age differences of empathy. Study 2 explored the effect of gender on pain empathy between two age groups. The results showed that the elders showed a gender separation on emotional empathy in the early stage. To be specific, older women and young participants'level of emotional empathy kept stable, but old men's emotional empathy dropped significantly compared with the other three groups. Both older men and old women generally showed a declinein cognitive empathy with no gender difference.
Study 3 explored how cognitive load influence pain empathy among different age groups. The results indicated that cognitive load affected early emotional sharing stage among the elders, and influenced young people's cognitive empathy in the late stage. There wasno influence on cognitive empathy of the elders.
Study 4 explored how age similarity affected the age differences of empathy.Results showed that the attention bias caused by age similarity was only reflected in the young group. And the elders showed sensitivity to young faces.
Situational factors can affect the age differences of empathy. In general, the elders are weaker than young people in term of emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. But the emotional empathy of older women remains stable. Cognitive load can affect the cognitive empathy of young people and the emotional empathy of the elders. At last, age similarity only affects young people.