A new study confirms the belief of many that women tend to be better than men at imagining or understanding what others are feeling or thinking.
Researchers came to this conclusion by assessing more than 300,000 people in 57 countries around the world using a test that measures empathy .
Our results provide some preliminary evidence of the well-known phenomenon that women are more empathetic than men, said study author David Greenberg from Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
The test used in the study is one of the most widely used tests for measuring empathy. It asks participants to choose a word or describe what a person in the photo is thinking or feeling by looking at a photo of the eye area of the face.
The new study found that across 36 countries, women scored significantly higher on average than men, and in no country did men score significantly higher than women.
This is true for the entire lifecycle of , from 16 to 70 years old, in three independent datasets and in many different languages.
Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Center at the University of Cambridge and senior study author, said the test showed that many people have difficulty reading facial expressions for a variety of reasons and should be available to those seeking support.
Dr Carrie Allison, director of applied research at the Cambridge Autism Research Centre, said in a university press release that the study clearly shows that there are broadly consistent gender differences across countries, languages and age. This raises new questions for future research into the social and biological factors that may contribute to the observed mean sex differences in cognitive empathy. #carewomen##male#
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