Empathic reactions of younger and older adults: No age related decline in affective responding

Empathy is an important skill in all stages of life. However, previous research suggests that cognitive empathy, i.e. the ability to accurately infer another person's feelings, is reduced for older adults. Here, we suggested that investigating affective empathy in addition to cognitive empathy could provide a more complete picture of how older adults differ from younger adults in their ability to empathize with others. For this, we presented videos of spontaneous facial expressions portraying happiness, anger, sadness and disgust to 39 younger and 39 older adults. Affective responding was measured via facial mimicry and cognitive empathy was measured via decoding accuracy. We did not expect and did not find evidence for impaired affective responding to emotional expressions in old age; however, cognitive empathy was reduced for happiness and sadness. Thus, empathic reactions of older adults might not be as affected as findings based only on decoding accuracy may suggest.