ABSTRACT

Empathy, or the ability to understand and respond to other people’s thoughts and feelings, can change as we age. Many researchers are studying how empathy changes with age, because it has a significant impact on a person’s mental health and interpersonal relationships. This paper briefly reviews the research on empathy conducted to date in older adults undergoing normal aging, with a particular focus on inconsistent findings. The reasons for the discrepancies in the results were mainly found in the research methods, such as different types of empathy or different empathy measurement tools. In the latter part of this paper, several methodological supplements were suggested to accurately account for the aging process of empathy. They were to develop standardized instruments of measuring empathy, to compare levels of empathy across different age groups, to study empathy levels in older adults longitudinally, to compare the aging of empathy across genders, and to take brain images immediately while an empathy task is presented.