Women have greater partner empathy than men: study

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A new study says that when their partners undergo difficilty in life, women are considerably more empathetic than men. -©auremar/shutterstock.com

It might not seem like news, but women exhibit considerably more empathy towards their partners than men do, according to a large-scale study at Griffith University and the University of Queensland in Australia.

When their partners succumbed to illness or experienced a traumatizing life event, women were noticeably affected although the inverse was not true, according to Dr. Cindy Mervin from Griffith Health Institute’s Centre for Applied Health Economics and Professor Paul Frijters from the University of Queensland.

“It is not that men are unemotional or uncaring, since they are quite strongly affected by what happens to themselves, but they simply are not very emotional when it comes to the feelings of their partner,” says Dr. Mervin.

Drs. Mervin and Frijters applied data from a large-scale study called Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA), which comprises over 20,000 subjects.

Men’s emotional happenings were not linked to the experiences of their partner, according to the researchers.

When women’s partners underwent a difficult situation the researchers measured their empathy levels at 24 percent, nearly the same as if they themselves were undergoing the problem.

“It is possible that men are probably more affected by their own roles and image as partners, than by the actual feelings of their partner,” says Professor Frijters. -afprelaxnews