Gender differences in affective sharing and self–other distinction during empathic neural responses to others’ sadness

Self–other distinction, the separation between self and other, is a prerequisite for empathy through which individuals share another individual’s feelings. Prior research suggests that females are better at recognizing and sharing others’ emotions, whereas males perform better at self–other distinction. It is unclear, however, whether this superiority in the self–other distinction occurs in males throughout the experience of empathy or only at some stages of the empathic process. The present study utilized event–related potentials (ERPs) to investigate this issue. In two separate experimental tasks, subjects were instructed to either judge the emotions shown on a face (other–task) or evaluate their own affective responses to the emotions shown on a face (self–task). The results of the other–task revealed that unlike males, females displayed increased P2 (190–240 ms) amplitudes to sad expressions compared with neutral expressions. This finding might be associated with an improved ability to recognize and share the emotions of others in females. In contrast, only males exhibited larger P2 amplitudes to sad expressions compared with neutral expressions during the self–task. This awareness of one’s own emotions in response to another individual might reflect a distinction between the self and the other at an early stage in males. At the late cognitive controlled stage, gender differences became weak. However, the emotion effects in each task for both genders were positively correlated with self-reported cognitive empathy, which was indexed by the perspective taking (PT) and fantasy (FS) subscale, but not with affective empathy.