The empathic measure of true emotion (EMOTE): a novel set of stimuli for measuring emotional responding.

Empathy plays a fundamental role in successful social interactions. However, most tasks currently available for measuring empathy have limited ecological validity and therefore may not elicit true emotional responses in observers. To address this gap, we developed the Empathic Measure of True Emotion (EMOTE), the first emotion stimuli set to include footage of genuine positive and negative emotions unfolding in naturalistic contexts.

Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Muscular Strength Do Not Predict Social Cognitive Capacity in Older Age.

Objectives: Social cognitive function often declines in older age but the mechanisms underlying these declines are not completely clear. Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and muscular strength are positively associated with broader cognitive function in older adults, yet surprisingly, no study has examined whether a similar relationship exists between CRF or muscular strength and social cognition in older age.

Methods: We assessed whether higher CRF and muscular strength were associated with enhanced social cognitive function in a sample of fifty older adults (Mage = 70.

The cognitive tenacity of self-directed ageism.

Ageism refers to prejudice or discrimination based on a person's age. When ageism is directed at older people, it is unique in two ways: it is socially condoned in a manner that other types of prejudice are not, and the animus is eventually self-directed. Of central interest here is why ageism becomes self-directed in late adulthood, despite its potentially harmful personal costs.

Emotion regulation mediates the relationship between social frailty and stress, anxiety, and depression.

Social frailty refers to an inability to meet basic social needs and has been identified as a threat to physical and mental health. Although social frailty has been linked with many adverse health and well-being outcomes, potential mediators of the relationship between social frailty and well-being remain poorly understood. Emotion regulation refers to the capacity to alter the experience of emotions to behave in accordance with a desired goal.

Subjective and objective sleep quality does not predict behavioural episodic foresight in younger or older adults.

Episodic foresight refers to one's capacity to use imagined scenarios to guide future-directed behaviors. It is important in facilitating complex activities of daily living, such as managing finances. Broader literature shows that older adults perform more poorly on tests of episodic foresight relative to their younger counterparts.

Emotion regulation mediates the effects of sleep on stress and aggression.

It is well established that poor sleep directly increases stress and aggression, but potential mediators of this relationship remain poorly understood. The present study provided the first direct test of whether capacity for emotion regulation mediated the relationship between sleep with stress. It also aimed to extend current understanding of whether emotion regulation might mediate the association between sleep and aggression, by assessing four distinct subcomponents of aggression (anger, hostility, verbal aggression, and physical aggression).

Absence of age differences in emotion perception and gaze patterns using a contextually rich film-based assessment.

Age differences in emotion perception are now well documented. However, a key limitation of many studies in this literature is the reliance on highly artificial tasks that lack context and consequently have poor ecological validity. This study reports two separate experiments that investigated age differences in emotion perception abilities using a highly contextualised film-based assessment along with a traditional emotion perception task.

Social Frailty in Late Adulthood: Social Cognitive and Psychological Well-Being Correlates.

Objectives: Social frailty poses a major threat to successful aging, but its social cognitive and psychological well-being correlates remain poorly understood. This cross-sectional study provides initial insights into whether social cognitive difficulties in older age are associated with social frailty, as well as how social frailty is linked to psychological characteristics known to be important for health and well-being.

Method: Ninety community-dwelling older adults completed measures of social frailty and social cognition (social perception, theory of mind, affective empathy, and informant-rated social behavior) as well as measures of psychological function known to be important for health and well-being, both positively (resilience and life satisfaction) and negatively (demoralization, social anxiety, and apathy).

Aging Is Associated With Multidirectional Changes in Social Cognition: Findings From an Adult Life-Span Sample Ranging From 18 to 101 Years.

Objectives: Normal adult aging is associated with changes in social cognition. Although 4 social cognitive domains have been identified (social perception, theory of mind [ToM], affective empathy, and social behavior), no study has tested all 4 domains concurrently in a life-span sample, limiting understanding of the relative magnitude of age-related changes across domains. This study addresses this gap by providing the first assessment of all 4 social cognitive domains in an adult life-span sample.

Determinants of Social Cognitive Aging: Predicting Resilience and Risk.

This review focuses on conceptual and empirical research on determinants of social cognitive aging. We present an integrated model [the social cognitive resource (SCoRe) framework] to organize the literature and describe how social cognitive resilience is determined jointly by capacity and motivational resources. We discuss how neurobiological aging, driven by genetic and environmental influences, is associated with broader sensory, neural, and physiological changes that are direct determinants of capacity as well as indirect determinants of motivation via their influence on expectation of loss versus reward and cognitive effort valuation.

Sleep, stress and aggression: Meta-analyses investigating associations and causality.

Prior research suggests that sleep is associated with increased subjective stress and aggression, but important questions remain about the typical magnitude of these relationships, as well as their potential moderators. We therefore conducted the first meta-analysis of this literature. Across 340 associational and experimental studies, significant associations were identified between sleep with both subjective stress (r = 0.

Visual attentional orienting by eye gaze: A meta-analytic review of the gaze-cueing effect.

Given limitations in the amount of visual information that a person can simultaneously process through to conscious perception, selective visual attention is necessary. Visual signals in the environment aid this selection process by triggering reflexive shifts of covert attention to locations of potential importance. One such signal appears to be others' eye gaze.

How Does Aging Affect Social Attention? A Test of Competing Theories Using Multilevel Meta-Analysis.

Objectives: The present study provides a meta-analytic assessment of how gaze-cued attention-a core social-cognitive process-is influenced by normal adult aging.

Methods: A multilevel meta-analysis of standardized mean changes was conducted on gaze-cueing effects. Age effects were quantified as standardized mean differences in gaze-cueing effect sizes between young and older adult samples.

Affective empathy in neurodegenerative disorders: The importance of measurement type.

In recent years, there has been increasing attention focused on affective empathy in neurodegenerative disorders (NDs). However, prior studies have identified discrepancies not only between, but sometimes within, specific NDs. These discrepancies may reflect methodological differences in how affective empathy has been operationalized, with three quite distinct approaches to assessment possible (self-report, informant-report and performance-based).

Profiling Social Cognition in Premanifest Huntington's Disease.

Objective: Discrepancies exist in reports of social cognition deficits in individuals with premanifest Huntington's disease (HD); however, the reason for this variability has not been investigated. The aims of this study were to (1) evaluate group- and individual-level social cognitive performance and (2) examine intra-individual variability (dispersion) across social cognitive domains in individuals with premanifest HD.

Method: Theory of mind (ToM), social perception, empathy, and social connectedness were evaluated in 35 individuals with premanifest HD and 29 healthy controls.

The influence of rs53576 polymorphism in the oxytocin receptor () gene on empathy in healthy adults by subtype and ethnicity: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Empathy is essential for navigating complex social environments. Prior work has shown associations between rs53576, a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) located in the oxytocin receptor gene (), and generalized empathy. We undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the effects of rs53576 on subdomains of empathy, specifically cognitive empathy (CE) and affective empathy (AE), in healthy adults.

The relationship between testosterone and social cognition in younger and older adults.

Testosterone (T) has been linked to poorer social cognition in younger adults. Because social cognition and T both decline with normal aging, a different type of relationship may exist between T and social cognition in late adulthood. To test this possibility, younger and older adults provided a salivary T sample and completed two social cognition tasks.

Acting with the future in mind: Testing competing prospective memory interventions.

Prospective memory (PM) is a critical determinant of whether a person is able to lead an independent life. Because PM declines in late adulthood, an important question is therefore whether, and if so, which types, of PM interventions might lead to meaningful benefits. In the present study, we randomly assigned older adults to one of four conditions, in three of which participants received a structured PM intervention (Restorative, Compensatory, and Combined Restorative and Compensatory); the fourth was an Active Control condition.

Event-Based but Not Time-Based Prospective Memory Is Related to Oral Health in Late Adulthood.

Background: Most evidence now indicates that cognitive function is related to poorer oral health in late adulthood, but that this relationship is not invariant across specific cognitive domains. Prospective memory (PM) is a core memory skill that refers to memory for future intentions and is known to be related to the formation of habits such as tooth flossing. However, the relationship between PM and oral health has been subject to only limited empirical study.

Empathy and schizotypy following acquired brain damage.

Objectives: Acquired brain damage is associated with a reduced capacity for empathy, and emerging evidence indicates that there may also be elevated levels of schizotypy. However, although a relationship between schizotypy and empathy has been identified in other populations, no study to date has tested whether this relationship is also evident following acquired brain damage, and if so, whether it is specific to certain types of brain damage, or specific types of empathy.

Methods: People with acquired brain damage restricted to either frontal (N = 18) or non-frontal (N = 24) neural structures and demographically matched controls (N = 48) completed an assessment of schizotypy and a measure of empathy that differentiated between cognitive, emotional, and social skills empathy.

Tears of sadness reduce others' gazing toward the eyes.

Emotional tears enhance perceptions of sadness and promote helping behaviors, but it is yet to be established whether they also influence the way we gaze at emotional faces. This is an important question to address given that how people visually attend to faces plays a critical role during social interaction and may also be used to regulate emotional arousal. We used eye-tracking to quantify the time spent gazing to the eyes and mouths of emotional faces.

Gaze patterns to emotional faces throughout the adult lifespan.

Prior research indicates that there may be age-related differences in visual attention to emotional faces, and that this might contribute to older adults' difficulties perceiving emotional facial displays. However, the nature and magnitude of age differences in gaze patterns have been inconsistent. Study 1 therefore used meta-analytic methodology to quantify age effects in gazing to the eyes and mouths of faces in standard emotion perception tasks.