Men and women both experience empathy-related brain activation when viewing good people in pain.
When viewing bad people in pain, men show decreased empathy and increased reward-related activation.
In contrast, women showed no significant decrease/increase in empathy/reward-related activation, respectively.
Women self-reported a desire for revenge on the bad people (lower than men's self-reported desire for revenge), but this did not correlate with brain activation.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2636868/
September 7, 2026 2.8K 117
