The Importance of Sex-of-Stimulus Object: Age Trends and Sex Differences in Empathic Responsiveness

The main goals of the study were to examine age trends and sex differences in empathic responsiveness, particularly empathic concern for others in distress. It was based on four cohorts of Norwegian students aged 13 to 16, comprising a total of 1193 boys and 1093 girls. The key measurement instrument was a partly new questionnaire on empathic responsiveness in which sets of items were differentiated according to sex-of-stimulus object. The empirical analyses showed convincingly that differentiation of the items with regard to sex-of-stimulus object was of critical importance for the discovery of the age trends that were present for boys and girls. Girls showed the most straightforward development, with an increase over age in empathic concern towards both girl and boy stimuli. The boys evinced a similar developmental pattern with regard to girls as stimuli but showed a clearly deviating, decreasing trend in emphatic concern for other boys in distress. Failure to consider sex-of-stimulus object is probably the main explanation for the inconsistent results previously reported for developmental trends in empathic responsiveness from age 11. In addition, and in agreement with previous research, we found very marked sex differences, with a strong predominance of low-empathic boys and a similarly marked predominance of high-empathic girls. Finally, the empirical analyses indicated the meaningfulness of partly separating out another facet of empathic responsiveness, i.e. empathic distress in which the emotional reaction is assumed to be more oriented toward the self than to the other, while the opposite is true of empathic concern. The results are discussed within an evolutionary perspective.