Everyday Empathic Accuracy in Younger and Older Couples

Abstract

On average, older adults are less accurate than younger adults at recognizing emotions from faces or voices. We challenge the view that such differences in emotion-recognition tasks reflect differences in empathic accuracy (the ability to infer other people’s feelings): Empathic accuracy relies not only on sensory cues (e.g., emotional expressions) but also on knowledge about the target person. Using smartphone-based measures, we assessed empathic accuracy in younger and older couples’ daily lives and found that younger adults’ empathic accuracy was higher than older adults’ empathic accuracy when their partners were visibly present. During the partners’ absence, however, when judgments relied exclusively on knowledge of those partners, no age differences emerged, and performance in both age groups was still more accurate than chance. We conclude that across adulthood, sensory information and knowledge differentially support empathic accuracy. Laboratory emotion-recognition tasks may therefore underestimate older adults’ empathic competencies.