Stress and Stress-Induced Glucocorticoids Facilitate Empathic Accuracy in Men but Have No Effects for Women

Abstract

Empathy, the ability to understand the feelings of other people, is critical for navigating our social world and maintaining social connections. Given that acute stress, and resulting increased glucocorticoids, triggers a shift in two large-scale brain networks, prioritizing salience over executive control, we predicted that acute psychosocial stress would facilitate empathic accuracy. We also investigated the moderating role of gender, given that men typically show a more robust glucocorticoid response to acute stress than women. As predicted, results from two independent experiments (N = 267 college-age participants; 2,256 observations) showed that acute psychosocial stress facilitated empathic accuracy for men, an effect related to their glucocorticoid response in the stress condition. Conversely, psychosocial stress had no effect on empathic accuracy for women, who also showed a smaller cortisol response to stress than men. Exploratory analyses further revealed that women taking oral contraceptives performed worse on the empathic-accuracy task than regularly cycling women. This research highlights the important, but complex, role of stress in cognitive empathy.