Empathy training usually aims to improve perspective-taking skills, as this component of empathy is subject to greater cognitive developmental and environmental influences through maturation or learning processes. The empathy training for student teachers on which this study is based also successfully targets this component. The question arose to what extent the changes in perspective-taking could be gender-specific, i.e., whether men or women achieved different improvement outcomes. To this end, we used two different measures of cognitive perspective-taking that looked at state- and trait-oriented changes, respectively. On both measures, we were able to achieve significant gains in perspective taking, consistent with the pilot study, which were also consistently detectable for several weeks after the end of the study. Both male and female subjects benefited equally from our training.
