Stress and Stress-induced Glucocorticoids Facilitate Empathic Accuracy in Men, with no Effects for Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Empathy, the ability to understand what others are feeling, is critical for social connection and navigating our social world. We investigated the effects of acute stress on cognitive empathy. Given that acute stress, and resulting increased glucocorticoid, triggers a shift in two large-scale brain networks, prioritizing the salience over the executive control network, we predicted that stress would facilitate empathic accuracy (EA). We also investigated the effect of gender/sex, given evidence of differential stress reactivity. Results from two independent studies (N= 267; 2,256 observations) showed that acute stress facilitated EA for men, an effect that was partly driven by their glucocorticoid response. Conversely, stress had no effect for women, who also slowed a blunted cortisol response. Moreover, exploratory analyses revealed that women taking oral contraceptives, in general, performed worse on the EA task than regularly cycling women. This research highlights the important, but complex, role of stress in cognitive 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) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".