Men's Empathy Toward Children's Emotions Across the Transition to Fatherhood

We investigated whether men's affective and cognitive empathy toward children's emotions changes across the transition to fatherhood. Specifically, we were interested in whether empathy increases with fathering experience. In two preregistered online studies (N = 1,046, primarily from the United Kingdom and the United States), participants' task was to rate their affective responses to emotional pictures of children (affective empathy) and to recognize children's emotions from pictures of the eye area (cognitive empathy). In Study 1 (N = 530), we compared childless men, expecting fathers, and fathers. Expecting fathers displayed greater affective empathy toward children than childless men, but they did not differ significantly from fathers. Unexpectedly, fathers exhibited lower cognitive empathy than expecting fathers. Study 2 (N = 516) extended these findings by investigating the impact of different levels of fathering experience among first-time fathers and those with prior parenting experience. Fathers of infants showed more affective empathy than childless men, regardless of prior parenting experience. Fathers with older children had lower cognitive empathy compared to childless men and fathers with infants. These results suggest that expecting fathers and fathers with a new infant may exhibit increased affective empathy to children's emotions. More experienced fathers and fathers of older children may have become accustomed to childcare, necessitating less intensive engagement to child signals. Future longitudinal studies are needed to determine whether empathy toward children's emotions shows within-person fluctuations during the transition to fatherhood instead of steadily increasing.