Poster #59 - Men’s Empathy Towards Children’s Emotions Across Transition to Fatherhood

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

Empathy is fundamental to sensitive caregiving, which in turn predicts a multitude of developmental and health outcomes for children. In this study, we investigated whether childless men, expecting men, and fathers of infants differ in affective and cognitive empathy towards children. Methods. We conducted an international online study with a cross-sectional design. To measure affective empathy, participants (n = 530) rated their compassion and positive affect towards emotional pictures of children (Bos et al., 2021). We measured cognitive empathy with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes of Children Test (RME-C-T), a task designed for measuring recognition of children’s emotions (Pahnke et al., 2020). Our preregistered hypotheses were that fathers would exhibit highest affective empathy to child signals and better emotion recognition ability followed by expecting men while childless men would score the lowest on both. Results. In line with our hypothesis regarding affective empathy, expecting men exhibited greater compassion and positive affect towards children than childless men. However, the difference between expecting men and fathers was not significant. Unlike we expected, cognitive empathy did not differ between childless and expecting men while fathers had lower emotion recognition accuracy than expecting men. We conducted exploratory analyses on differences between first-time and more experienced fathers and found that more experienced fathers reported less compassion towards children and were worse at recognizing children’s emotions compared to first-time fathers. Differences between expecting men and fathers were driven by lower affective and cognitive empathy of more experienced fathers. Conclusions. Expecting men might be more sensitive and attentive to child signals in preparation for fatherhood, and hence show more affective and cognitive empathy. Meanwhile fathers might become accustomed to childcare, and their reactions may taper off over time. Fathers of small infants might also experience more stress and cognitive load in early parenthood impacting their cognitive empathy. However, it should be noted that the group differences were small. In a follow-up online study (planned n = 350), we are studying whether fathers’ parity indeed affects their empathy with pre-registered, confirmatory analyses. These new results will be presented at the conference together with the current data.

Authors

• Sonja Veistola, Tampereen yliopisto (Tay)
  Presenting Author

• Rike Pahnke

• Alexander Lischke

• Peter Bos

• Mikko Peltola