中国科学院心理健康重点实验室知识库

摘要：共情是准确推断他人特定想法和感受的一种能力，在社会互动和社会理解中发挥关键作用，可能是成功老龄化的标志。老龄化问题日益严重，代际差异带来的社会矛盾不断增加。老年人共情能力已成为研究热点，但在理论和实践研究中都存在争论{Wieck, 2015 #140;Blanke, 2016 #121}。社会情绪选择理论认为随着年龄增加，老年人的共情能力尤其是情绪共情能力应该保持稳定或上升，但老化脑理论认为随着相关脑区的老化，老年人共情能力下降。过去研究并未有一致性结果，基于此，本研究采用行为实验与ERP研究相结合的方式研究共情的年龄效应。

结果如下：研究一测量在疼痛图片判断的行为实验中疼痛共情的年龄差异，结果发现青年人对疼痛强度的感知要好于老年人，面对同样的疼痛场景时，青年人对疼痛刺激更加敏感，与以往的研究结果基本一致。研究二采用ERP实验探索疼痛共情的年龄效应，在早期情绪共情阶段即在N1成分中，男女性老年人表现不同，老年女性的情绪共情能力与青年人保持相当水平，而老年男性的情绪共情能力显著下降；在晚期的认知共情阶段即在LPP成分中，老年男性与女性的认知共情水平普遍下降，无性别差异。总体而言，老年人情绪共情和认知共情能力较青年人都有所降低，但老年女性的情绪共情能力保持较好。

Abstract:Empathy is the ability to accurately infer the specific thoughts and feelings of others.It plays a key role in social interaction and social understanding, which may be a sign of successful aging. Given that the aging problem is becoming more and more serious nowadays, there are many social contradictions caused by intergenerational differences. The empathy of elders has become a research focus, but there is controversy among current researches. Socioemotional selectivity theory predicted that the empathy, especially the emotional empathy,would remain stable with the increase of age. But the brain-aging model indicated that the regions of brain related to empathy would atrophied with aging, so elders’ empathy would decline as well. Above all, this study conducted behavior experiments and ERP experiments to detect the age difference of empathy.Study 1 measured the age difference of pain empathy in the behavioral experiment, it was found that young people had better perception of pain intensity than old people. When faced with the same pain scene, young people were more sensitive to pain stimulation, which was basically consistent with previous research results. ERP experiment was conducted to explore the age effect of pain empathy in study 2. In the early stage of emotional empathy,and the elderly women maintained a similar level of emotional empathy ability with the young people in N1 component, while the elderly men showed a significant decline in emotional empathy ability.In the late stage of cognitive empathy, the cognitive empathy levels of elderly men and women generally declined without gender differences in LPP component.In general, the emotional empathy and cognitive empathy abilities of the elderly were lower than those of the young, but the emotional empathy abilities of the elderly women remained better.