Abstract
Empathy indicates the ability of individuals to imitate, share, and understand other person’s emotion and opinions, and it plays an important role in social interaction. This study examined the gender differences in empathy, and the effects of couples’ dyadic empathy, adult romantic attachment and gender role on relationship satisfaction. Participants came in with their partners (N=66, 33 couples) completed a stressful cognitive task separately while rating each other’s levels of anxiety, and filled out self-report questionnaires. Empathy was indicated by the mismatch between respondents’ report of their own anxiety and their partner’s view of that anxious feeling in a stressful situation behaviorally, supplementing the self-report questionnaire. For behavioral empathy, the relation between individual’s self-report feelings and partner’s rated scores was positive for females only. Gender differences were also found in self-reported empathy, with males reporting higher levels of perspective-taking than females. An actor-partner interdependent model (APIM) showed that both the individual’s own and his/her partner’s empathic concern significantly predicted romantic relationship satisfaction, but gender did NOT moderate that relation. Moderated APIM found that masculine gender role moderated the actor effect of empathic concern on relationship satisfaction. The relation between empathic concern and relationship satisfaction was partially mediated by attachment avoidance and partner’s attachment anxiety, and the mediation effects of attachment avoidance was moderated by masculine gender role. This study adds to existent research on gender differences in empathy using multiple measurements, and adopting a dyadic approach to explore the relation between empathy and relationship satisfaction. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.