Empathy and Conversational Enjoyment in Younger and Older Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
UNLABELLED: BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Investigations of empathy across adulthood have yielded mixed findings, yet its contribution to successful social interactions is clear. METHODS: Here, the authors investigate the relationship between empathy and self-reported conversation enjoyment in 144 young adults (M age = 19.50) and 120 older adults (M age = 68.75). Participants completed three empathy-related measures (Interpersonal Reactivity Index [IRI], Toronto Empathy Questionnaire [TEQ], and Affect Intensity Measure [AIM]), and rated their enjoyment of recalled conversations with diverse targets. RESULTS: On the IRI, older adults had higher scores than younger adults on Empathic Concern, but lower scores on the Personal Distress and Fantasy subscales. For younger adults, conversations with same-age acquaintances were most enjoyable and conversations with children and older adults were least enjoyable. Older adults reported similar enjoyment across all groups. However, the links between conversation enjoyment and empathy were stronger for older adults. CONCLUSION: These results highlight the importance of a multidimensional view of empathy, and the possibility that empathy influences conversational interactions differentially across the life span.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".