Emotional Valence Influences Empathic Capacity in Adolescence and Young Adulthood

Previous research has identified age-related differences in empathic abilities between adolescence and young adulthood. While cognitive empathy appears to continue to develop from adolescence and into adulthood, the developmental trajectory of affective empathy is less clear. It is also unclear how valence influences empathic responding and whether this differs according to age. To address this, we assessed age differences in cognitive and affective empathy in adolescents and young adults using a newly developed empathy measure that includes contextually rich stimuli with a variety of positive and negative emotions.

We recruited 109 participants, including 50 adolescents (aged 13-20 years, 60% female) and 59 young adults (aged 25-35 years, 59% female). All participants completed the EMOTE, which indexed cognitive empathy accuracy and affective empathy ratings. All data were collected in Australia between 2024 and 2025.

Adolescents had lower cognitive empathy accuracy than young adults, whereas affective empathy ratings did not differ between the age groups. Emotional valence influenced empathic responding, such that cognitive empathy accuracy was higher for positive compared with negative stimuli in both age groups, and affective empathy ratings were stronger for negative compared with positive stimuli in adolescents only.

Our findings support the view that cognitive empathy continues to develop into young adulthood, while affective empathy remains more stable. Critically, our results highlight the role of emotional valence in shaping empathic responding, particularly in adolescence.