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

Abstract

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.

Full text

Developmental Psychology
Men’s Empathy Toward Children’s Emotions Across the Transition to
Fatherhood
Sonja Veistola, Peter A. Bos, Rike Pahnke, Alexander Lischke, and Mikko J. Peltola
Online First Publication, December 5, 2024. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0001838
CITATION
Veistola, S., Bos, P. A., Pahnke, R., Lischke, A., & Peltola, M. J. (2024). Men’s empathy toward children’s
emotions across the transition to fatherhood. Developmental Psychology. Advance online publication.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0001838

Men’s Empathy Toward Children’s Emotions Across the
Transition to Fatherhood
Sonja Veistola
1
, Peter A. Bos
2
, Rike Pahnke
3
, Alexander Lischke
4, 5
, and Mikko J. Peltola
1
1
Department of Psychology, Human Information Processing Laboratory, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University
2
Institute of Education and Child Studies, Leiden University
3
Department of Sport Science, University of Rostock
4
Department of Psychology, Medical School Hamburg
5
Institute of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Medical School Hamburg
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.
Public Significance Statement
We investigated men’s empathy toward children at different stages of fatherhood. Unexpectedly,
empathy did not uniformly increase with fatherhood experience, but men who were expecting or
currently caring for a baby showed heightened empathy toward children’s emotions. Empathy is
necessary for appropriate responding to children’s needs and understanding its development in men
across the transition to fatherhood is important for identifying and supporting new fathers who might
struggle with empathy.
Keywords: fathers, fatherhood, empathy, emotion recognition, emotions
Supplemental materials: https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001838.supp
Koraly Pérez-Edgar served as action editor.
Sonja Veistola https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8383-3344
Peter A. Bos https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8944-0181
Alexander Lischke https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8322-2287
Mikko J. Peltola https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9993-9963
Alexander Lischke and Mikko J. Peltola share last authorship. The
preregistration as well as the data and analysis code can be found online Open
Science Framework repository at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/9YG5Z.
The authors have no known conflicts of interest to disclose. This research
was supported by grants from the Suomen Akatemia and Research Council
of Finland (Grant 307657 awarded to Mikko J. Peltola and Grant 321424).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non
Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0;
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0). This license permits copy-
ing and redistributing thework in any mediumor format for noncommercialuse
provided the original authors and source are credited and a link to the license is
included in attribution. No derivative works are permitted under this license.
Sonja Veistola played a lead role in conceptualization, data curation,
formal analysis, investigation, visualization, and writing–original draft and
an equal role in project administration. Peter A. Bos played a lead role in
resources and an equal role in supervision and writing–review and editing.
Rike Pahnke played a lead role in resources and an equal role in methodology
and writing–review and editing. Alexander Lischke played a supporting role
in supervision and an equal role in methodology, resources, and writing–
review and editing. Mikko J. Peltola played a lead role in funding acquisition
and supervision and an equal role in data curation, methodology, project
administration, and writing–review and editing.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sonja
Veistola, Department of Psychology, Human Information Processing
Laboratory, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University, Kanslerinrinne
1, 33014 Tampere, Finland. Email: sonja.veistola@tuni.fi
Developmental Psychology
© 2024 The Author(s)
ISSN: 0012-1649 https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001838
1

Research on human paternal caregiving has advanced rather
recently, in part propelled by sociocultural and economic adjust-
ments, which encourage fathers’greater involvement in direct
childcare (M. J. Bakermans-Kranenburg et al., 2019;Behari, 2021;
Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, 2018;Lamb, 2013;
Lucassen et al., 2011;Pleck & Pleck, 1997). However, paternal
caregiving in humans is not a new phenomenon. Human parenting
is a complex, malleable, and cooperative process, extending beyond
the mother–infant bond and societal changes (L. Gettler et al., 2020;
for review, see Sear, 2016). The capacity of human males to assume
primary caregiver roles, including single or same-sex parents, under-
scores their psychological and biological disposition for caregiving.
However, there remains a need to understand the biological
and psychological mechanisms that prepare men for their new role
as a caregiver when they become a parent (Rilling, 2013). This
study investigated differences in men’s empathy, a crucial aspect
of caregiving, throughout the process of becoming fathers. In the
first study, we examined affective and cognitive empathy concerning
children’s emotions in fathers, expecting fathers, and childless
men. The subsequent study expanded on these findings by exploring
variations in empathy toward children’s emotions between first-time
fathers and those with prior parenting experience.
Empathy is an essential precursor for sensitive parenting, which
includes the caregiver’s ability to recognize and respond to the
child in a way that matches the child’s needs (Ainsworth et al.,
1978). While intertwined (Kanske, 2018) empathy can be divided
into affective and cognitive components (Smith, 2006). Cognitive
empathy encompasses abilities such as perspective taking and emo-
tion recognition (Frith & Frith, 2006), while affective empathy
encompasses abilities such as affect sharing and compassionate
responding (de Vignemont & Singer, 2006). Both components are
important in the context of parental caregiving: Parents need cognitive
empathy to infer children’s emotions, thoughts, andneeds from verbal
and nonverbal cues (Braadbaart et al., 2014;Sauter & Eimer, 2010)
but without affective empathy the motivation to respond to the child’s
emotions, thoughts, and needs might not arise (Blair, 2005). Hence,
fathers’affective and cognitive empathy is necessary for fathers’
engagement in attuned caregiving behavior (Cardenas et al., 2021).
In this article, we compare groups of men in different stages of the
transition to fatherhood to see if both affective and cognitive empathy
are affected by this developmental stage in a man’slife.Previous
studies have shown that first-time fathers undergo biological changes
that might help them to become more attuned and empathic toward
children’s emotions (Diaz-Rojas et al., 2021;Paternina-Die et al.,
2020). Hormonal (L. T. Gettler et al., 2011) and neural changes
(Abraham et al., 2014;Kim et al., 2014) across the transition
to fatherhood might relate to fathers’enhanced empathic ability
and indicate preparation for caregiving (Feldman & Bakermans-
Kranenburg, 201 7;Feldman et al., 2012;Fleming et al., 2002;Gordon
et al., 2010,2017;Mascaro, Hackett, & Rilling, 2014).
Regarding neural changes across the transition to fatherhood, men
show functional and structural changes in a network of brain regions
that are implicated in empathy and caregiving (Abraham et al., 2014;
Diaz-Rojas et al., 2021;Horstman et al., 2022;Kim et al., 2014). For
instance, compared to childless men, fathers show greater activation
in brain regions involved in empathy and emotion when viewing
children’s emotional expressions (Mascaro, Hackett, & Rilling,
2014). First-time fathers also show similar activation of neural
systems involved in empathizing and motivation as first-time mothers
when they hear infant cries (Li et al., 2018). These activation patterns
suggest changes in brain activity that prime empathetic responding
and empathetic behavior in men. Such brain changes might
begin already during their partner’s pregnancy. Fathers show activity
changes in brain regions implicated in empathy and caregiving
during their partner’s middle-to-late pregnancy that are even more
pronounced after the child is born (Diaz-Rojas et al., 2023). These
brain changes also continue to take part after the child’sbirthas
indicated by structural brain changes in empathy-related brain regions
in the first month after birth (Kim et al., 2014). These brain changes
become even more pronounced in fathers who take on more childcare
responsibility indicated by greater cohesion between brain regions
associated with empathy and caregiving (Abraham et al., 2014;
Horstman et al., 2022).
Regarding hormonal changes across the transition to fatherhood,
men’s testosterone levels decline as they become a father (Edelstein
et al., 2017;L. T. Gettler et al., 2011;Gray et al., 2002;Saxbe et al.,
2017), a change that is hypothesized to help the new father to shift
their focus competition and mating to family and childcare (Archer,
2006;L. T. Gettler et al., 2011). Besides shifting men’s focus to
parenting, the decline in testosterone levels across the transition to
fatherhood was proposed to indicate a change toward more empathic
responding to infant’s distress by Fleming et al. (2002). They found
that, compared to childless men, fathers responded to infant distress
with greater sympathy and urge to help the infant and the effect
was more pronounced among fathers with lower testosterone
levels (Fleming et al., 2002). Furthermore, compared to nonfathers,
fathers demonstrate elevated oxytocin levels (Grumi et al., 2021), a
hormone linked to parental behavior (Yoshihara et al., 2018) and
potentially heightened empathic responses toward children (Li et al.,
2017). Oxytocin has been shown to interact with testosterone across
the transition to parenthood (Gordon et al., 2017;Weisman et al.,
2014), yet further research is needed to fully understand its impact
on paternal behavior, independently or in interaction with other
hormones (M. Bakermans-Kranenburg et al., 2022).
In sum, previous research suggests that men go through adaptive
biological and psychological changes across the transition to
parenthood that pertain to empathy toward children. The available
body of evidence suggest that empathetic responding and empathetic
behavior toward children increases throughout fatherhood, but
this has not been systematically investigated in previous studies. To
investigate this, we conducted two preregistered cross-sectional
studies where we assessed affective and cognitive empathy in men
at different stages of fatherhood in both studies. In Study 1, we
investigated whether childless men, men expecting their first child
(i.e., expecting men), and men with children (i.e., fathers) exhibit
differences in affective and cognitive empathy toward children’s
emotions. In Study 2, we investigated whether childless men, first-
time fathers and experienced fathers differ in affective and cognitive
empathy toward children. In addition, we investigated in both studies
how personality traits, child-related attitudes, and parenting-related
experiences are associated with cognitive and affective empathy
across fatherhood (see Supplemental Material S1).
Study 1
In our first preregistered study, we investigated whether
men’s empathy toward children increases across the transition to
fatherhood. We hypothesized that fathers would show more and
2VEISTOLA, BOS, PAHNKE, LISCHKE, AND PELTOLA

childless men less affective empathy toward children compared to
expecting men (Hypothesis 1). Similarly, we hypothesized that
childless men would show less, and fathers more cognitive empathy
compared to expecting men (Hypothesis 2). Thereafter, we explored
whether personality traits (empathy, alexithymia), depressive and
anxiety symptoms, and child-related attitudes (parental care, parental
attitudes, parental attachment, parental involvement) associate with
empathy across fatherhood (see Supplemental Material S1). The
study was in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and
the study protocol was discussed with the Ethics Committee of the
Tampere Region. The design, hypothesis, and analysis plan of
Study 1 was preregistered. The preregistration as well as the data and
analysis code can be found online (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF
.IO/9YG5Z).
Method
Participants and Design
We ran a cross-sectional online study with three independent
groups: childless men, expecting men, and fathers (Table 1).
Participants (N=530) were recruited between Spring 2021 and
Fall 2021 via the online participant pool Prolific(https://www.prolific
.com/), except for one participant who heard of the study via social
media. We used the “pwr”package for R (Champely, 2020)to
calculate required sample size for our planned analyses to be 207 per
group to reliably detect an effect size of f
2
=.02 with significance level
α=.05 and 85% statistical power. As we could not reach the desired
number of expecting men via Prolific due to outdated information on
some participants’profiles within our time window, we decided to
proceed with the achieved sample size at the end of Fall 2021.
We prescreened participants with Prolific’sfilters. For all groups,
we recruited people who were assigned male at birth, spoke
English as their first language, and lived together with a partner in a
relationship. Childless men were selected from a population that had
no children and whose partner was not expecting at the moment of the
study. In addition to the participants included in the analyses, four
childless men were rejected due to indicating they had a child, they
were not male, or they were not living with a partner. Expecting men
were not allowed to have previous children, and their partner was
pregnant at the time of the study. Fathers had had a child between
2020 and 2021 and their partner was not currently expecting. Of
the total fathers, 126 had their first infant (i.e., first-time fathers) and
72 also had older children in addition to an infant (i.e., experienced
fathers). In addition to the fathers included in the analyses, nine
fathers were rejected because they indicated contradictory informa-
tion about the age of their youngest child in their Prolificprofile and
demographic survey in the study; hence, it was unclear when their
baby was born and whether they fit the inclusion criteria.
Little over half of the participants were from the United Kingdom
(54.2%) and a third from the United States (30.9%). The rest of
the participants (14.9%) were from elsewhere in Northern America,
Europe, Africa, or Oceania. Of all participants, 42.6% had an
undergraduate degree (BA/BSc/other), 27.39% had a Graduate
degree (MA/MSc/MPhil/other) or a Doctorate degree (PhD/other),
and 23.12% had completed either a high school diploma/A-levels or
Technical/community college. The remaining participants (6.89%)
had completed Secondary education (e.g., General Educational
Development/General Certificate of Secondary Education), did not
have formal education, or indicated that they could not respond.
Procedure and Measures
The study was run via the online experiment interface Gorilla
(https://gorilla.sc/) on the participants’personal computer or tablet.
After providing informed consent, participants completed a demo-
graphic questionnaire. They were prevented from participating in the
study at this stage if their answers to the demographic questionnaire
did not match their answers to the prescreening questions.
Participants completed empathy tasks (Bos et al., 2021;RME-C-T;
Pahnke & Lischke, 2020;Pahnke et al., 2020)andfive questionnaires
(reported in Supplemental Material S1). The study lasted approxi-
mately 25 min. After the questionnaires, the experiment finished and
participants were debriefed, compensated (£3.75), and thanked for
participation.
Affective Empathy Task. To measure affective empathy, we
used a task (Bos et al., 2021) in which participants viewed grayscale
images of children in naturalistic situations. The images depicted
children (aged approximately 3–6 years) in negative (e.g., a child
surrounded by destroyed buildings), positive (e.g., a child playing
with a parent), or neutral (e.g., a child sitting at a dining table)
situations. There were 10 images of each valence, that were presented
in a random order (2 s). Each image was preceded by a fixation cross
(1 s) and followed by two questions (self-paced). In total, the
participants viewed 30 images during the task and answered two
questions per picture, resulting in 60 responses. Participants gave their
answers with a slider measure on a continuous numerical scale (range
1–9, in .01 increments). The first question measured positive affect:
“How positive do you feel about the picture?”(1 =not at all positive,
9=very positive). The second question measured compassion: “How
much compassion do you feel for the child?”(1 =notatall,9=very
much). The mean rating on each scale was used as an outcome
measure, one reflecting positive affect and one reflecting compassion.
Cognitive Empathy Task. The cognitive empathy task was
amodified version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task
(RME-T, Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), called the Reading the Mind in
theEyesofChildrenTask(RME-C-T;Pahnke & Lischke, 2020;
Pahnke et al., 2020). In this task, participants viewed color images
Table 1
Descriptive Statistics of the Three Participant Groups
Characteristic
Group
Childless men (n=203) Expecting men (n=129) Father (n=198)
Children No children Expecting first child An infant (<1 year old)
Age (years) 35.8 (12.0, range =18–65) 30.3 (6.11, range =18–49) 32.0 (5.33, range =18–47)
MEN’S EMPATHY ACROSS THE TRANSITION TO FATHERHOOD 3

of the eye region of children’s faces (aged approximately 8–10 years)
expressing distinct emotional expressions. Participants had to identify
the expressed emotion by selecting one out of four labels describing
different emotions. One label (target) described the expressed
emotion, whereas three labels (distractors) described other emotions.
Participants completed two versions of the RME-C-T: one version
(RME-C-T-C) with 34 trial images depicting complex emotions (e.g.,
jealous, worried), and one version (RME-C-T-B) with 28 trial images
depicting basic emotions (e.g., happy, sad). We used the mean of
correctly identified expressions, separately for basic and complex
emotions, as the task outcomes.
Data Analysis
All analyses were done with R Version 4.2.1 (R Core Team, 2022).
The significance value for all analyses was set at α=.05, uncorrected
for multiple comparisons. We ran preregistered categorical regression
analyses with the “stats”package (R Core Team, 2022) to investigate
group differences in the empathy tasks. Because of nonnormality in
some of the regression models, we used nonparametric bootstrapping
(n=1,000 simulations) to obtain confidence intervals of regression
coefficients using the “boot”package (Canty & Ripley, 2021).
We decided to diverge from our preregistration with regard to
the treatment of outliers. Instead of removing, as preregistered, we
winsorized outliers to improve the nonnormal distributions. Values
below 5%-quantile and above 95%-quantile were replaced by the
value at 5%-quantile or 95%-quantile, respectively. We inspected
normality visually before and after winsorizing to determine its effect
on the distributions.
Affective Empathy Task. As an initial validity check, we
confirmed that participants reported significantly more compassion
toward negative than neutral images, t(529) =36.48, p<.001, and
greater positive affect toward positive images than neutral images,
t(529) =48.57, p<.001.
We tested whether childless men, expecting men and fathers
differed in affective empathy. Specifically, we tested whether
childless men reported less empathy toward children compared
to expecting men, and whether fathers reported more affective
empathy compared to expecting men (Hypothesis 1) against the
null hypothesis that there are no differences between the groups.
To this aim, we predicted compassion scores toward negative
images and positive affect toward positive images by group. We
fitted a categorical regression model using group as a predictor and
expecting men as the reference group to predict the compassion
and positive affect mean scores.
Cognitive Empathy Task. As an initial validity check, we
confirmed that participants were significantly more accurate in
recognizing basic than complex emotions, t(529) =30.28, p<.001.
In line with the preregistered criteria, we excluded participants from
the analyses if their task performance was equal or below guessing
level (25%). Whereas all participants performed above guessing level
on the complex task version, three participants (two fathers, one
childless man) performed below guessing level on the basis task
version. Consequently, we considered527 participants in the analyses
of the basic task version. All participants scored above guessing level
on the complex version of the task and were included in the analyses.
We investigated whether childless men, expecting men and fathers
differed in cognitive empathy toward children. Specifically, we tested
whether childless men were less accurate in recognizing children’s
emotions compared to expecting men, and whether fathers were more
accurate compared to expecting men (Hypothesis 2) against the
null hypothesis that there are no differences between the groups. To
test whether the groups differed in cognitive empathy, we fitted a
categorical regression model to predict basic and complex emotion
recognition accuracy scores with group as a predictor and expecting
men as the reference group.
Results
Participant Characteristics
We checked whether participants differed in age, country of
residence, or education level. The three groups did not differ in
education level, but country of residence, χ
2
(30) =52.18, p=.007,
and age differed between the groups significantly. Childless men,
t(329) =5.01, p<.001, and fathers, t(325) =2.57, p=.011, were
significantly older than expecting men, and childless men were
significantly older than fathers, t(316) =3.43, p=.001. Age had a
small, negative correlation with compassion in the affective empathy
task, r=−10, t(528) =−2.36, p=.018. For this reason, we added
age as a covariate to our regression model with compassion as the
outcome. Age did not correlate with other test scores. Country was
not related to any task scores.
Affective Empathy
Group explained a statistically significant portion of the variance
in compassion (Figure 1), R2
adj =.02, CI [.001, .04], F(3, 526) =
3.83, p=.010, with age added as a covariate. Group also explained a
significant portion of positive affect (Figure 2), R2
adj =.01, CI [.001,
.03], F(2, 527) =3.57, p=.036. Childless men (7.63, SD =1.10)
Figure 1
Men’s Compassion Toward Children’s Emotions by Group
Note. See the online article for the color version of this figure.
*p<.05.
4VEISTOLA, BOS, PAHNKE, LISCHKE, AND PELTOLA

had lower compassion scores compared to expecting men (7.95,
SD =0.96), b=−0.27, CI [−0.53, −0.05], t(526) =−2.21, p=.026.
There was no significant difference between expecting men and
fathers (7.74, SD =1.09) in compassion, b=−0.22, CI [−0.43,
0.004], t(526) =−1.83, p=.068. Age had a very small negative
relationship with compassion, b=−0.011, CI [−0.02, 0.01],
t(526) =−2.08, p=.038. Similar to compassion, childless men
(7.55, SD =0.81) had lower positive affect scores compared to
expecting men (7.78, SD =0.75), b=−0.22, CI [−0.39, −0.03],
t(527) =−2.52, p=.012, but again there was no difference in
positive affect between expecting men and fathers (7.68, SD =0.77),
b=−0.10, CI [−0.26, 0.07], t(527) =−1.08, p=.279.
Exploratory Analyses. The father’s group contained men who
had had their first infant (i.e., first-time fathers) and fathers who
had an infant and older children (i.e., experienced fathers). We ran
an exploratory analysis where we separated the fathers group into
experienced and first-time fathers. We first ran the same regression
model as in the main analyses, but without first-time fathers, and
found lower compassion in childless men compared to expecting men,
b=−0.32, CI [−0.51, −0.05], t(401) =−2.61, p=.010, and lower
compassion in experienced fathers compared to expecting men, b=
−0.42, CI [−0.75, −0.10], t(401) =−2.65, p=.008. Alternatively,
when we excluded experienced fathers from the fathers’group,
childless men again had lower compassion compared to expecting
men, b=−0.32, CI [−0.53, −0.08], t(455) =−2.75, p=.006, but
there was no difference between expecting men and first-time fathers
in compassion, b=−0.10, CI [−0.33, 0.11], t(455) =−0.77, p=.441.
Experienced fathers did not differ from expecting men in positive
affect, b=−0.19, CI [−0.44, 0.04], t(401) =−1.60, p=.111, while
childless men again had a lower positive affect compared to
expecting men, b=−0.22, CI [−0.39, −0.04], t(401) =−2.48, p=
.014. First-time fathers and expecting men did not differ in positive
affect either, b=−0.04, CI [−0.22, 0.13], t(455) =−0.45, p=
.651, and, as in all models above, childless men displayed lower
positive affect than expecting men, b=−0.22, CI [−0.38, −0.05],
t(455) =−2.55, p=.011.
Hence, expecting men showed similar positive affect and
compassion as first-time fathers, and there was no difference between
expecting men and experienced fathers in positive affect. However,
experienced fathers showed less compassion than expecting men.
Cognitive Empathy
Group explained a small, but significant proportion of the
variance in emotion recognition accuracy on the basic version of the
task, R2
adj =.01, CI [.001, .04], F(2, 524) =3.17, p=.043 (Figure 3).
Unlike we hypothesized, neither childless men (.82, SD =.09), b=
.002, CI [−.02, .02], t(524) =0.20, p=.846, nor fathers (.80, SD =
.09), b=−.02 CI [−.04, .00], t(524) =−1.88, p=.061, differed
from expecting men (.82, SD =.09) in basic emotion recognition.
Group also explained a small, but significant portion of the
variance in emotion recognition accuracy on the complex task
version, R2
adj =.01, CI [.002, .04], F(2, 527) =4.03, p=.012
(Figure 4). As in the basic version of the task, there was no
difference between expecting men (.67, SD =0.11) and childless
men (.67, SD =0.10) in complex emotion recognition, b=.01, CI
[−.02, .03], t(527) =0.48, p=.630, but fathers (.64, SD =0.10)
were slightly less accurate in complex emotion recognition than
expecting men, b=−.02, CI [−.05, −.00], t(527) =−2.05, p=.041.
Figure 2
Men’s Positive Affect Toward Children’s Emotions by Group
Note. See the online article for the color version of this figure.
*p<.05.
Figure 3
Men’s Emotion Recognition Accuracy of Children’s Emotions in the
Basic Version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes of Children Task
(RME-C-T-B) by Group
Note. See the online article for the color version of this figure.
MEN’S EMPATHY ACROSS THE TRANSITION TO FATHERHOOD 5

Exploratory Analyses. As for affective empathy, we explored
separately whether fathers of multiple children (i.e., experienced
fathers) and first-time fathers differed from expecting men in
cognitive empathy. Expecting men did not differ from childless men
in basic, b=.002, CI [−.02, .02], t(452) =0.20, p=842, nor complex
emotion recognition, b=.006, CI [−.02, .03], t(455) =0.49, p=.626,
when only first-time fathers were included. Further, there was no
difference between expecting men and first-time fathers in basic, b=
−.005, CI [−.03, .02], t(452) =−0.41, p=.684, nor complex emotion
recognition, b=−.02, CI [−.04, .01], t(455) =−1.19, p=.237.
Expecting men also did not differ from childless men in basic, b=
.002, CI [−.017, .023], t(400) =0.20, p=.845, nor complex emotion
recognition, b=.01, CI [−.02, .03], t(401) =0.47, p=.640, when
only experienced fathers were included. However, experienced
fatherswerelessaccurateinbasic,b=−.05, CI [−.07, −.02], t(400) =
−3.36, p=.001, and complex emotion recognition, b=−.04, CI
[−.07, −.01], t(401) =−2.54, p=.011, than expecting men.
Interim Discussion
In our first preregistered study, we ran hypothesis-driven analyses
to test whether empathy differs in men at different phases of
fatherhood. We hypothesized that fathers would show more and
childless men less affective (Hypothesis 1) and cognitive (Hypothesis
2) empathy toward children compared to expecting men. Our
hypothesis regarding affective empathy (Hypothesis 1) was partially
confirmed. We found that expecting men exhibited more affective
empathy compared to childless men, while they did not differ from
fathers. Contrary to our hypothesis regarding cognitive empathy
(Hypothesis 2), we found that expecting men were as accurate in
complex emotion recognition as childless men and more accurate in
recognizing complex emotions in children than fathers. Basic
emotion recognition accuracy did not differ between expecting men,
childless men, and fathers.
Motivated by the partly unexpected findings of our preregistered
analyses, we ran exploratory follow-up analyses where we looked at
first-time (i.e., fathers with one infant) and experienced (i.e., with at
least one older child and an infant) fathers separately. We found that
first-time fathers and expecting men did not differ in affective and
cognitive empathy. However, experienced fathers showed lower
affective empathy in terms of compassion and poorer complex
emotion recognition accuracy than expecting men. These findings
are in contrast to our initial hypothesis that empathy toward children
increases in linear fashion throughout fatherhood. The findings
rather suggest a nonlinear increase in empathy toward children
throughout fatherhood.
These somewhat unexpected findings led us to investigate the
influence of fathering experience on empathy toward child signals
more comprehensively. Consequently, in our second preregistered
study, we compared affective and cognitive empathy between five
distinct groups of men: childless men, first-time fathers of an
infant, fathers of one older child, experienced fathers of an infant
and at least one older child, and fathers with multiple older
children. Varying both the number and age of children between the
groups allowed us to identify the primary driver for the observed
differences in empathy between first-time and experienced fathers
in Study 1.
Study 2
Drawing insights from our Study 1 findings, we investigated
whether empathy toward children changes in a nonlinear fashion
across men’s transition to and at different stages of fatherhood. As
outlined in our preregistered hypotheses, we hypothesized that first-
time fathers would display more affective and cognitive empathy
than experienced fathers and childless men (Hypothesis 1). In
addition, we hypothesized that first-time fathers with an infant would
display more affective and cognitive empathy than fathers with an
older child (Hypothesis 2). We posited a two-sided hypothesis
regarding differences in cognitive and affective empathy between
fathers with one older child and fathers with multiple older children
(Hypothesis 3). However, we hypothesized that fathers with multiple
children, including an infant, would demonstrate more affective
and cognitive empathy than fathers with multiple older children, who
do not have an infant (Hypothesis 4). Beyond these father-status
oriented hypotheses, we tested whether parent-related experiences,
such as stress exposure, sleep disturbance or study distractions
would associate with fathers’cognitive and affective empathy (see
Supplemental Material S1).
The design, hypothesis, and analysis plan of Study 2 was
preregistered. The preregistration and data-analysis script are
available online (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/9YG5Z). The
study was conducted in accordance with Declaration of Helsinki
and the study protocol was discussed with the Ethics Committee of
the Tampere Region.
Figure 4
Men’s Emotion Recognition Accuracy of Children’s Emotions in the
Complex Version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes of Children
Task (RME-C-T-C) by Group
Note. See the online article for the color version of this figure.
*p<.05.
6VEISTOLA, BOS, PAHNKE, LISCHKE, AND PELTOLA

Method
Participants and Design
We collected an independent, cross-sectional online study (N=
516) consisting of five groups (Figure 5 and Table 2): first-time fathers
with an infant, fathers with only one older child, fathers with older
children and an infant, fathers with multiple older children, and
childless men. We recruited the sample in Winter 2023 via the online
participant pool Prolific(https://www.prolific.com). We used “pwr”
package for R (Champely, 2020) to calculate the required sample size
for our planned analyses to be 110 per group to reliably detect an
effect size of f
2
=.02 with significance level α=.05 and 80%
statistical power. However, we could not reach the desired number of
menwithaninfantviaProlific within our time window. We decided to
proceed with the sample size we achieved by the end of Winter 2023.
All participants were prescreened with Prolific’sfilters to
determine eligibility for recruitment. We only recruited participants
who were assigned male at birth, spoke English as their first language,
lived together with a nonexpecting partner in a relationship, and had
not participated in our first study. Inclusion criteria for fathers was that
they were currently living in the same household as their biological
child(ren). Childless men were included only if they did not have or
cohabit with children.
Most participants were from United Kingdom (72.4%) and
21.4% were from the United States. The rest (6.2%) were from
elsewhere in Europe, North America, Oceania, and South Africa. Of
all participants, 44.5% had completed an undergraduate degree,
17.7% had a master’s degree, 15.7% had high school/A-levels
education, and 11.5% had completed technical/community college.
The remaining participants(10.6%) had a doctorate degree, secondary
education, or no formal qualifications.
Procedure and Measures
The study was run via the online experiment interface Gorilla
(https://gorilla.sc) on participants’personal computer or tablet. After
providing informed consent, participants completed a demographic
questionnaire. Participants whose answers to the demographic
questions did not match their answers to the prescreening questions
were prevented from further participation. Included participants
completed the same empathy tasks (Bos et al., 2021), RME-C-T-C
(Pahnke & Lischke, 2020), RME-C-T-B (Pahnke et al., 2020)
as in Study 1. In addition, participants completed a series of
questionnaires for the assessment of personality traits, child-related
attitudes, parenting-related experiences, and stress indicators (see
Supplemental Material S1). Following the completion of ques-
tionnaires, participants were debriefed, compensated (£3.75), and
thanked for participation. The whole study lasted approximately
25 min.
Data Analysis
All analyses were done with R Version 4.2.1 (R Core Team, 2022).
The significance value for all analyses was set at α=.05, uncorrected
for multiple comparisons. We ran preregistered categorical regression
analyses with the “stats”package (R Core Team, 2022) to investigate
group differences in participants’performance on the empathy tasks.
Because of nonnormality in some of the regression models, we
used nonparametric bootstrapping (n=1,000 simulations) to
obtain confidence intervals of regression coefficients using the
“boot”package (Canty & Ripley, 2021). To improve the normality
distribution in the regression models, outliers were winsorized by
replacing values below the 5%-quantile and above the 95%-quantile
with the value at 5%-quantile or 95%-quantile, respectively.
Affective Empathy Task. We used the mean ratings of positive
affect toward positive images and compassion toward negative
images as the outcomes of the affective empathy task, similarly as in
Study 1. As an initial validity check, we confirmed that participants
reported significantly more compassion toward negative than
neutral images, t(517) =33.43, p<.001, and greater positive
affect toward positive than neutral images, t(517) =51.08, p<.001.
We first compared affective empathy between childless men, first-
time fathers (i.e., fathers of an infant) and experienced fathers (i.e.,
fathers of one older child and no infant, experienced fathers of
multiple older children and no infant, and fathers of multiple older
children and an infant). First, we investigated whether childless men
would show less positive affect and compassion than first-time and
experienced fathers (Hypothesis 1a). To this aim, we ran categorical
regression analyses with group as the predictor and childless men as
the reference group for the prediction of men’s positive affect and
compassion.
Then, we used ttests to investigate differences between the
fathers’groups more closely. We first tested whether compassion
and positive affect are higher in first-time fathers (i.e., those with one
infant) compared to fathers with an older child (i.e., those with one
older child and no infant; Hypothesis 2a). Next, we investigated
whether experienced fathers without an infant (i.e., fathers of one
older child and fathers of multiple older children) differ from each
other in compassion and positive affect (Hypothesis 3a). Finally,
we tested whether compassion and positive affect are higher in
experienced fathers of multiple children and an infant compared to
experienced fathers of multiple older children without an infant
(Hypothesis 4a).
Cognitive Empathy Task. As in Study1, we used mean
emotion recognition accuracy, in terms of correctly recognized basic
Figure 5
Participants Were Divided Into Four Groups Depending on
Whether They Had an Infant and How Many Children They Had
Note. The fathers’groups from top left to bottom right: first-time fathers
with an infant, fathers with one older child, fathers with older children and an
infant, and fathers with multiple older children. In addition, we had a group of
childless men.
MEN’S EMPATHY ACROSS THE TRANSITION TO FATHERHOOD 7

and complex expressions as outcomes of the cognitive empathy
task. For an initial validity check, we confirmed that participants
were significantly more accurate in recognizing basic than complex
emotions, t(517) =35.51, p<.00. Participants performed the basic
and complex task version above guessing level (25%), indicating no
need to exclude any participant from the analyses.
We first compared basic and complex emotion recognition
accuracy between childless men, first-time fathers (i.e., fathers of an
infant), and experienced fathers (i.e., fathers of one older child and
no infant, experienced fathers of multiple older children and no
infant, and fathers of multiple older children and an infant). First, we
investigated whether childless men would show lower basic and
complex emotion recognition accuracy compared to first-time and
experienced fathers (Hypothesis 1b). To this aim, we ran categorical
regression analyses with group as the predictor and childless men as
the reference group for the prediction of men’s basic and complex
emotion recognition accuracy.
Then, we used ttests to investigate differences between the
fathers’groups. We first tested whether basic and complex emotion
recognition accuracy are higher in first-time fathers (i.e., those
with one infant) compared to fathers with an older child (i.e., those
with one older child and no infant; Hypothesis 2b). Next, we
investigated whether experienced fathers without an infant (i.e.,
fathers of one older child andfathers of multiple older children) differ
from each other in basic and complex emotion recognition accuracy
(Hypothesis 3b). Finally, we tested whether basic and complex
emotion recognition accuracy are higher in experienced fathers of
multiple children and an infant compared to experienced fathers of
multiple older children without an infant (Hypothesis 4b).
Results
Participant Characteristics
We checked whether participants differed in age, country
of residence, or education level. The groups differed in age,
F(4, 513) =33.59, p<.001. However, age was not correlated with
compassion, r=.06, t(516) =1.48, p=.139; positive affect, r=
−.01, t(516) =−0.17, p=.862; recognition of basic emotions, r=
.03, t(516) =0.61, p=.544; nor recognition of complex emotions,
r=−.03, t(516) =−0.64, p=.524. Education level did not differ
between the groups, χ
2
(24) =32.19, p=.122. Groups differed in
Country of residence, χ
2
(32) =102.9, p<.001. However, Country
of residence was not related to compassion, H(8) =8.00, p=.434;
positive affect, H(8) =5.73, p=.678; recognition of basic emotions,
H(8) =4.11, p=.847; nor recognition of complex emotions, H(8) =
6.390, p=.604. Correlations between the task scores and additional
questionnaires can be found in the Supplemental Tables S3 and S4.
Affective Empathy
Our first categorical regression analysis with group predicting
men’s compassion and childless men as the reference group
(Figure 6) showed that group explained only .01% of the variance
in compassion scores, R2
adj =.01, CI [.002, .04], F(4, 513) =2.33, p=
.055, which was not significant. However, compared to childless men
(7.47, SD =1.29), both experienced fathers with an infant and older
children (7.83, SD =1.24), b=.34, CI [.06, .64], t(513) =2.41, p=
.016, and first-time fathers of an infant (7.94, SD =1.12), b=.40, CI
[.13, .69], t(513) =2.67, p=.008, showed more compassion.
Childless men did not differ from fathers of one older child (7.58,
SD =1.37), b=.19, CI [−.09, .46], t(513) =1.35, p=.178, nor
fathers with multiple older children (7.77, SD =1.09), b=.25, CI
[−.02, .51], t(513) =1.81, p=.070.
Our second categorical regression analysis with group predicting
men’s positive affect and childless men as the reference group
(Figure 7) showed that group explained a small but significant pro-
portion of positive affect, R2
adj =.01, CI [.01, .05], F(4, 513) =3.84,
Table 2
Descriptive Statistics of the Five Participant Groups
Characteristic
Childless men
(n=110)
First-time father
(n=78)
Fathers with one
older child (n=125)
Fathers with older child(ren)
and an infant (n=93)
Fathers with older
children (n=112)
Number of children 0 One infant One child At least two children At least two children
Has an infant No Yes No Yes No
Age 35.3
(11.1, range =18–78)
32.1
(3.59, range =23–41)
40.5
(10.5, range =18–72)
34.1
(5.4, range =18–46)
45.0
(9.8, range =18–72)
Figure 6
Men’s Compassion Toward Children’s Emotions by Group
Note. See the online article for the color version of this figure.
*p<.05. ** p<.01.
8VEISTOLA, BOS, PAHNKE, LISCHKE, AND PELTOLA

p=.004. All groups of fathers showed higher positive affect
than childless men (7.51, SD =0.74): first-time fathers with an infant
(7.72, SD =0.80), b=.30, CI [.09, .51], t(513) =2.62, p=.009;
fathers with one older child (7.90, SD =0.73), b=.26, CI [.06, .47],
t(513) =2.61, p=.009; fathers of an infant and older children (7.90,
SD =0.73), b=.40, CI [.21, .61], t(513) =3.72, p<.001; and fathers
of multiple older children (7.74, SD =0.79), b=.24, CI [.04, .44],
t(513) =2.31, p=.022.
Closer comparison of the fathers’groups showed that there were
no significant differences between the fathers’groups. First-time
fathers of an infant did not show higher compassion, t(201) =1.53,
p=.127, nor positive affect, t(201) =0.31, p=.756, when
compared directly to fathers of one older child. Further, fathers
without an infant did not differ from each other depending on
whether they had one child or multiple children in compassion,
t(235) =0.50, p=.615, nor in positive affect, t(235) =−0.24, p=
.811. Finally, fathers of multiple children, that is, fathers of older
children with an infant and fathers of older children without an
infant, did not differ in compassion, t(203) =0.69, p=.491, nor in
positive affect, t(203) =1.53, p=.129.
Cognitive Empathy
Our first categorical regression analysis with group predicting
men’s basic emotion recognition accuracy and childless men as the
reference group (Figure 8) showed that group did not explain a
significant proportion of basic emotion recognition, R2
adj =.01, CI
[.001, .03], F(4, 513) =1.59, p=.176. Childless men (.83, SD =.10)
did not differ in basic emotion recognition accuracy from first-time
fathers (.81, SD =0.12), b=−.01, CI [−.04, .01], t(513) =−0.83,
p=.361; fathers of one older child (.80 SD =0.12), b=−.02, CI
[−.04, .00], t(513) =−1.51, p=.132; nor from fathers with older
child(ren) and an infant (.82, SD =0.10), b=−.003, CI [−.03, .02],
t(513) =−0.27, p=.786. However, fathers with multiple older
children and no infant had lower basic emotion recognition accuracy
(.79, SD =0.12) than childless men, b=−.03, CI [−.05, −.002],
t(513) =−2.23, p=.027.
Our second categorical regression analysis with group predicting
men’s complex emotion recognition accuracy and childless men as
the reference group (Figure 9) showed that group did not explain a
significant proportion of variance in complex emotion recognition,
R2
adj =.005, CI [.001, .03], F(4, 513) =1.62, p=.169. There were no
group differences: Childless men (0.67, SD =0.11) did not differ in
emotion recognition accuracy from first-time fathers (0.66, SD =
0.12), b=−.00, CI [−.03, .02], t(513) =−0.29, p=.771; fathers of
one older child (.66, SD =.11), b=−.01, CI [−.03, .02], t(513) =
−.43, p=.669; fathers with older child(ren) and an infant (.68, SD =
0.10), b=.07, CI [−.01, .04], t(513) =1.21, p=.227; or fathers with
multiple older children (.64, SD =0.12), b=.07, CI [−.04, .01],
t(513) =1.21, p=227.
Closer comparison of the fathers’groups showed that the only
significant group difference was that fathers of multiple children
with an infant were more accurate in complex emotion recognition
compared to fathers of multiple children with no infant, t(203) =
2.52, p=.012. However, fathers of multiple children did not differ
from each other in basic emotion recognition depending on whether
they had an infant, t(203) =1.85, p=.066. First-time fathers did not
show higher basic emotion recognition, t(201) =0.43, p=.668,
Figure 7
Men’s Positive Affect Toward Children’s Emotions by Group
Note. See the online article for the color version of this figure.
*p<.05. ** p<.01.
Figure 8
Men’s Emotion Recognition Accuracy of Children’s Emotions in the
Basic Version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes of Children Task
(RME-C-T-B)
Note. See the online article for the color version of this figure.
*p<.05.
MEN’S EMPATHY ACROSS THE TRANSITION TO FATHERHOOD 9

nor complex emotion recognition, t(201) =0.09, p=.930, when
compared directly to fathers of one older child. Further, fathers
without an infant did not differ from each other depending on
whether they had one child or multiple children in basic, t(235) =
−0.75, p=.454, nor in complex emotion recognition, t(235) =
−0.97, p=.333.
General Discussion
In two preregistered studies, we investigated whether men’s
empathy toward children’s emotions differs at different stages
of fatherhood. In the first study, we compared empathy toward
children between childless men, expecting men and fathers of
infants. We first ran preregistered analyses to test our hypotheses
that affective and cognitive empathy toward children’s emotions
increase in a linear fashion throughout the transition to fatherhood,
that is, empathy is lowest in childless men and highest in fathers of
infants. In contrast to our hypothesis regarding affective empathy,
expecting men showed more compassion and positive affect
than childless men but similar compassion and positive affect as
fathers. Contrary to our hypothesis concerning cognitive empathy,
expecting men were slightly more accurate in emotion recognition
than fathers. To elucidate possible explanations for these findings,
we separated first-time fathers and more experienced fathers (i.e.,
those with more than one child) and compared them to childless and
expecting men. These exploratory analyses revealed lower affective
and cognitive empathy in experienced fathers than expecting men
but similar affective and cognitive empathy between first-time
fathers and expecting men.
Prompted by the results of Study 1, our second preregistered study
investigated whether the extent of fathers’exposure to a care-requiring
infant and experience of childcare are associated with affective and
cognitive empathy. We compared affective and cognitive empathy
between childless men and fathers, varying both the number and age
of children the fathers had. This allowed us to investigate the primary
driver for the observed differences in empathy between first-time
and experienced fathers in Study 1 more closely. Based on the results
from our first study, we expected affective and cognitive empathy to
be higher in first-time fathers compared to experienced fathers
and childless men. However, we found that fathers with an infant,
regardless of previous parenting experience, showed more compas-
sion than childless men. Moreover, compared to childless men, all
fathers showed more positive affect, irrespective of the age or number
of children they had. Further, closer comparisons between the fathers’
groups revealed no significant group differences in affective empathy.
Regarding cognitive empathy, fathers with multiple older children
showed lower basic emotion recognition accuracythan childless men.
They also had lower complex emotion recognition accuracy when
compared to fathers with multiple children and an infant.
Together the findings suggest that especially fathers who are
expecting or caring for an infant might show increased affective
empathy toward children. In other words, instead of steadily increa-
sing with parenting experience, affective empathy might follow a
curvilinear trajectory throughout the transition to fatherhood and
across its various stages. However, confirming individual trajectories
across the transition to fatherhood require further investigation with
longitudinal analyses. In addition, our results indicate that cognitive
empathy may be less susceptible to change across the transition to
parenthood compared to affective empathy. This disparity may stem
from the implicit, motivational, and innate nature of affective
empathy (Singer & Lamm, 2009), contrasting with the partly learned
and more controlled aspects of cognitive empathy (Bull et al., 2008;
Heyes & Frith, 2014;Kanske, 2018). Affective empathy can further
be influenced by top-down functions such as attention (Singer &
Lamm, 2009), and changes in attention toward child signals can be
seen throughout the transition to parenthood (Ferrey et al., 2016),
which could elucidate shifts in affective empathy.
For fathers, the period of expecting and caring for a preverbal
infant for the first time might represent a particularly sensitive phase
during which their responsiveness to child signals is heightened
(L. T. Gettler et al., 2021;Li et al., 2018;Storey et al., 2000). This
heightened sensitivity could be seen as a beneficial mechanism that
guides fathers to respond to infant distress. Meanwhile, an older
child has a broader range of ways to communicate their needs and
emotions and the parent’s sensitivity to nonverbal signals might
taper off with the child’s age as it becomes less paramount. In fact,
instead of a linear increase, a gradual decrease in empathy toward
children in fathers may even be adaptive, as excessively high
empathy could lead to aversive reactions (Li et al., 2018), such as
personal distress, potentially resulting in an avoidance of interacting
with the child (Mascaro, Hackett, Gouzoules, et al., 2014).
The second study results suggest that even fathers with prior
childcare experience may return to their former level of empathy
when exposed to a preverbal infant, necessitating the interpretation
and response to the infant’s nonverbal signals. Being responsible for
a care-requiring infant might give rise to a sensitive period during
which fathers are more compassionate and affectionate toward
children (Stallings et al., 2001), regardless of previous parenting
Figure 9
Men’s Emotion Recognition Accuracy of Children’s Emotions in the
Complex Version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes of Children
Task (RME-C-T-C)
Note. See the online article for the color version of this figure.
10 VEISTOLA, BOS, PAHNKE, LISCHKE, AND PELTOLA

experience. However, this finding is only partially consistent with
the exploratory findings of our first study that suggested experienced
fathers with infants to show lower empathy compared to first-time
fathers. These findings emerged in exploratory analyses, rendering
them more susceptible to false discovery than the findings of our
second study that were obtained from preregistered analyses.
Although we believe that the findings of our second study were more
robust, we recommend further research in this area to clarify how the
presence of an infant modulate affective empathy toward children
at different stages of the transition to fatherhood, preferably with a
longitudinal design.
Linkages between men’s neural changes across the transition to
fatherhood, fathering experience, and responses to child signals
need further research. Research on mothers suggests that neural
responses to infant affective cues are modulated by parity (Maupin
et al., 2019) and that primiparous mothers, as compared to
multiparous mothers, show heightened alertness toward such cues
(Bunderson et al., 2020;Maupin et al., 2016) and rate them as higher
in arousal (Parsons et al., 2021). Similar studies on fathers could
help us shed light on potential differences between first-time and
experienced fathers’reactions toward child signals.
Previous studies point to potential links between fathering
experience and men’s hormonal systems that are implicated in
empathy and caregiving, while the resultsare somewhat inconclusive.
For example, after an initial decrease in testosterone following
childbirth,fathers can go through a testosterone rebound as their child
grows (Corpuz et al., 2021;Rosenbaum et al., 2018). The decrease in
testosterone can also be maintained for a longer period in fathers who
cohabit with their children (Mascaro, Hackett, & Rilling, 2014),
although it is uncertain whether cohabitation is the driving force
for suppressing the testosterone rebound (L. Gettler et al., 2015).
Parenting experience can also influence fathers’immediate physio-
logical reactions to child signals (Fleming et al., 2002;L. T. Gettler
et al., 2021). For example, first-time fathers were found to show
an increase in oxytocin when holding their first-born, whereas
experienced fathers’oxytocin levels did not differ between pre- and
postholding (L. T. Gettler et al., 2021). More studies are needed to
confirm potential linkages between fathers’caregiving experience,
physiology, and empathy toward children’s emotional signals.
Future studies could also further disentangle whether men’s neural
and hormonal changes brought on by the transition to fatherhood
are related to both affective and cognitive empathy. Although the
exploratory results from Study 1 suggested that experienced fathers
might display less cognitive empathy toward children than first-time
fathers, we found no differences in emotion recognition between
experienced fathers of multiple children and first-time fathers in our
second study. However, experienced fathers of multiple children with
an infant were more accurate in recognizing complex emotions than
fathers of multiple older children without an infant. Notwithstanding
the need of further research on the impact of infant exposure on
cognitive empathy, we think that the findings of the second study are
more robust given that they come from preregistered analyses. These
findings suggest that infant exposure modulates fathers’cognitive
empathy toward children similarly as affective empathy. The findings
of the second preregistered study, thus, support our assumption that
exposure to care-requiring infants makes fathers more sensitive to
children across fatherhood, thereby increasing cognitive as well as
affective empathy throughout fatherhood in a curvilinear fashion.
Limitations
Despite running two preregistered studies in large samples with
established empathy tasks and questionnaires, there are some study
characteristics that limit the interpretation and generalizability of
our findings. First, although our sample was large and international,
most participants were well educated and from Western countries.
Furthermore, our native-level English requirement narrowed the
sample mostly to the United States and United Kingdom. The
language limitation was crucial, though, as it evened out differences
between participants’vocabulary and understanding of the tasks.
Nevertheless, care should be taken when generalizing our results to
more diverse samples.
Online data collection offered us the benefit of collecting large
samples, however, it lent us less control over the situation in which
a participant completed the study—a common challenge for online
research. The large sample offers some buffer against potential
noise introduced by variability in the setting, nevertheless further
research is necessary to determine whether the current findings can
be replicated in laboratory studies that allow a better control of
extraneous factors than online studies.
Given that large sample sizes such as the ones in the present
studies easily reach statistical significance, it is important to consider
the practical significance of our results. We did not predict large
effects in empathy as a function of parenthood, and as we expected,
all effect sizes were small. Finding small effect sizes is important
information as it suggests caution when hypothesizing about, for
example, associations between physiological responses and fathers’
behavior or perception of child signals. Since our large study only
found small effect sizes, it might not be justified to presume
robust connections between men’s physiological changes and their
parenting behavior in smaller samples. Further, the small differences
between groups suggest that other, individual variables play a role in
explaining differences between individuals within the groups. For
example, fathers’reactions to their own infant’s distress have been
linked to the infant’s characteristics, fathers’testosterone reactivity,
trait empathy, and marital quality (Kuo et al., 2016). Future studies
are needed to elucidate individual variation in fathers’empathic
responses toward children’s emotional signals.
Further, we should consider some features of the stimuli we used.
Both tasks depict pictures of unfamiliar children. Our results might
differ if the pictures were taken of the father’s own children since
fathers might display higher attention and empathy to their own
children and lower empathy toward unfamiliar children (cf.
Vuoriainen et al., 2022). To address the issue of child familiarity,
future studies should employ images of familiar and unfamiliar
children in empathy tasks. Besides the children being unfamiliar,
they were approximately at preschool or school age in both empathy
tasks. Children at this age show more refined and, therefore, easier
to interpret, emotions than children at younger ages. To address the
issue of child age, future studies should employ images of children
at different ages, such as infancy, kindergarten, preschool, and
school-age.
Final issue is specific to the affective empathy task, and the
observed differences between affective empathy toward positive and
negative emotions. Differences in arousal might have specifically
affected fathers’empathetic responses to positive and negative
images in the affective empathy task. Negative images(e.g., an image
of child among collapsed buildings) likely elicit more arousal than
MEN’S EMPATHY ACROSS THE TRANSITION TO FATHERHOOD 11

positive images (e.g., an image of a child playing with their parent),
leading to stronger emotional reactions and corresponding empathetic
feelings. This contrast might be further heightened by random
presentation of the stimuli. We can see from the distributions that
compassion toward negative pictures had a stronger left skew than
positive affect toward positive images, which indicates that more
participants gave higher ratings toward the negative images than the
positive images. Although this task has been shown to associate
with relevant hormonal factors in the previous studies (Bos et al.,
2021;Spencer et al., 2022), and in Study 2, compassion scores were
correlated with participants’self-reported empathy (see Supplemental
Material), which gives confidence in using this task, future studies
should use arousal-matched negative and positive images for the
empathy tasks.
Conclusions and Future Directions
Studies on empathy in fatherhood are crucial to understand
differences in sensitive caregiving among fathers. Whereas the
present studies provided insights into fatherhood-related empathy
changes from a cross-sectional point of view, future longitudinal
studies are needed to provide more in-depth insights into individual-
level changes across the transition to fatherhood. Longitudinal studies
are also necessary to unravel potential curvilinear trajectories in
empathy throughout fatherhood that we can only suggest based on the
present cross-sectional studies. Importantly, associating changes in
empathy with actual caregiving behavior is an important next step in
illuminating important factors in men’s transition to fatherhood.
Studies that combine empathy with caregiving tasks in longitudinal
designs may be particularly useful to understand the interplay
between empathy and caregiving changes throughout fatherhood.
These types of studies might help to identify men who have
difficulties in empathy at early stages of fatherhood experience
disruptions in empathy at later stages of fatherhood, which could lend
important information for interventions and health care providers for
supporting new fathers.
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Received December 21, 2023
Revision received July 13, 2024
Accepted July 15, 2024 ▪
14 VEISTOLA, BOS, PAHNKE, LISCHKE, AND PELTOLA