Empathy is a prerequisite for establishing good interpersonal relationships and is vital for successful aging. This research investigated how motivational factors (social motivation and age relevance of task) influence cognitive and affective empathy in aging. In Study 1, we directly manipulated social motivation with instructions, and used the Multidimensional Empathy Test (MET) to measure cognitive and affective empathy in young and older adults. The results showed that age-related differences in cognitive empathy was moderated by social motivation, while their affective empathy maintained a rising trend. In Study 2, we focused on motivating participants to spontaneously engage in the task by manipulating age relevance of task, and used a new video-based paradigm to measure cognitive and affective empathy. Further, given that cognitive empathy might require more involvement of cognitive functions than affective empathy, we also measured the effect of cognitive functions on age-related difference in empathy. The results showed that age-related differences in cognitive empathy between young and older adults was moderated by the age relevance of task, while their affective empathy still stayed rising. In addition, cognitive functions could only significantly predict cognitive empathy for young-relevant topics, but not for old-relevant topics. Overall, cognitive and affective empathy exhibited different aging trajectories, in which cognitive empathy was susceptible to motivational factors, while affective empathy remained intact or even increase. These findings provided strong evidence for us to modify the Russian Doll model of empathy, which contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the lifelong development of empathy and is of great value to health care for older adults.

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Correspondence:

Wenhai Zhang, zwh20120106@163.com