Effects of age and sex on neurophysiological substrates of empathy: a cross-sectional EEG study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although empathy is an indispensable competence to social adaptation throughout the lifespan, it has been mostly studied with subjective, questionnaire-based measures in the context of healthy aging. Electroencephalography (EEG) provides an objective measure to investigate underlying neurophysiological processes related to empathy through mu rhythm. The current study used empathy-related mu rhythm during the observation of emotional facial expressions (EFE) in addition to the Empathy Quotient questionnaire in order to explore age-related changes of empathy across sexes. A total of 65 participants, including 33 young adults and 32 seniors, took part in this study. They were instructed to observe as well as to try experiencing emotional facial expressions (joy, fear, neutral) depicted on short video clips during which continuous EEG was recorded. They also completed the Empathy Quotient (EQ) questionnaire. Young adults reacted more strongly to emotional EFEs. Seniors perceived themselves as less empathic and exhibited an equivalent neurophysiological response to emotional and neutral stimuli. A significant sex effect in favour of females was found on mu rhythm modulation. Mu rhythm appears to be an age and sex sensitive neurophysiological marker linked to empathy and could therefore serve as an objective measure of empathy.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".