Empathy decline at older age?

Empathy is a cornerstone of human communication and social interaction. It allows us to not only know what someone else is feeling, but to experience and share another person’s emotions as if we were partially feeling them ourselves ([1] for review). While precursors of empathy such as emotion contagion exist from early infancy, more complex empathic responses require neurodevelopmental processes that might not have reached full maturation until adulthood. On the other end of the age range, neurodegenerative disorders such as fronto-temporal dementia have been associated with a partial loss of empathic abilities. Much less is known, though, about whether empathy also shows a decline with healthy aging, and how this is associated with changes in the underlying neural circuitry. In a recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study [2], thus aimed to pinpoint age-related changes in the neural substrates of empathy, using a cross-sectional design comparing healthy adolescents, young adults and persons of older age (around 16, 25 and 63 years, on average). Their main finding was that while adolescents and young adults did not show significant differences in neural activation, participants of older age showed reduced neural responses in a key area for empathic responding, the anterior insular cortex. While being largely in line with previous research by other groups [3], several aspects of this new study are noteworthy. First, older adults differed from younger ones only with respect to their neural activation, but not in their empathic assessments. This indicates that neural data may be more sensitive than behavioral data to pick up first signs of a decrease in empathy. Second, the observed differences could not be explained by differences in the way participants experienced emotions themselves, as a control condition testing first-hand emotion processing did not yield any age-related differences. Third, the observed reduction in empathy-related activity was not due to age-related differences in Theory of Mind, a socio-cognitive skill that has been speculated to account for age-related problems in social behavior (for a review see [4]). This suggests that they are genuinely related to brain activation changes in the affective domain, and the ability to share others’ feelings rather than only to know about them. Importantly, the latter aspect receives decisive support by this being the first study which directly showed agerelated empathy differences to occur in areas related to Editorial