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No country for girly men: High instrumentality men express empathic concern when caring is “manly”

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Abstract

Two studies explored the relationship between men’s gender role identity (as measured by the Bem Sex Role Inventory) and their experience of empathic concern (situational empathy). In both, participants read of a man coping with his friend’s death while being exposed to one of three subliminal primes: “real men care”/“caring is strength,” “girly men care”/“caring is weakness,” or “people are walking.” Congruent with previous research, higher femininity (expressivity) predicted greater empathic concern irrespective of prime. The real men/strength primes tended to: (1) increase empathic concern among high instrumentality men; and (2) link empathic concern to predominantly positive projected coping responses when participants thought of themselves in the survivor’s situation, consistent with the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Thus, subtly framing empathic concern as a positive emotional response that is congruent with an agentic self-appraisal seems to boost traditionally masculine men’s willingness to experience it.

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Notes

  1. In addition to the primary analyses that focused on “pure” (i.e., residualized) measures of empathic concern and personal distress, we conducted a parallel set of regressions using the raw empathic concern and personal distress measures as dependent variables. The key instrumentality x dummy prime interaction on empathic concern was significant in Study 2 (p = .009) but not Study 1 (p = .137). This discrepancy was likely due to the fact that there was significantly greater overlap between empathic concern and personal distress in Study 1 versus Study 2, z = 2.62, p = .009. Indeed, Study 1’s instrumentality x dummy prime interaction on raw (rather than residualized) personal distress likewise failed to reach significance (p = .511). From our perspective, these discrepant results for raw versus residualized scores underscore the importance of treating empathic concern and personal distress as conceptually and empirically distinct for the purposes of the present research.

    As an additional test of the robustness of the key effects on empathic concern, and in light of the planned conceptual similarity of the respective primes used in Studies 1 and 2, we collapsed across the two samples and performed similar regression analyses on both pure and raw empathic concern. In each case, the femininity main effect remained significant (both ps < .001), as did the instrumentality x dummy prime interaction (both ps = .003). There were no other significant main effects or interactions.

  2. When analyzed separately, the key interaction was significant for both positive coping, β = .33, t (91) = 2.53, p = .013, partial-R 2 = .058, 95 % CI [.07, .58], and negative coping, β = -.38, t (91) = -2.79, p = .006, partial-R 2 = .079, 95 % CI [-.65, -.11].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, St. Jerome’s University, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G3, Canada

    Christopher T. Burris & John K. Rempel

  2. University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    Kristina M. Schrage

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  1. Christopher T. Burris
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  2. Kristina M. Schrage
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Correspondence to Christopher T. Burris.

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Burris, C.T., Schrage, K.M. & Rempel, J.K. No country for girly men: High instrumentality men express empathic concern when caring is “manly”. Motiv Emot 40, 278–289 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-015-9525-7

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