The study, led by Philipp Yorck Herzberg of Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg together with colleagues at the European Distance University Hamburg and the University of Bern, set out to answer a question posed nearly thirty years earlier by Dean and Malamuth. Those researchers had found in 1997 that the interaction between hostile masculinity and impersonal sexuality robustly predicted sexual aggression only among men high in dominance and low in nurturance, a pattern they interpreted as possibly driven by empathy. Nurturant individuals, after all, tend to be warm, gentle and sensitive to others’ needs, traits closely linked to empathic capacity. But the question remained whether empathy itself was the critical protective ingredient, or merely one facet of the broader dominance-nurturance dimension.

To disentangle the two, the researchers recruited 300 heterosexual men aged 18 to 65 through online advertisements on social networks and internet forums, without disclosing that the survey concerned sexual aggression. Participants completed the German version of the Sexual Experience Survey, a ten-item count of sexually coercive behaviors ranging from verbal manipulation to physical force or incapacitation through alcohol or drugs. Hostile masculinity was measured with the Hostile Sexism Scale of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, impersonal sexuality with the revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory, and dominance and nurturance with the revised Bem Sex-Role Inventory. Crucially, empathy was assessed with the German adaptation of Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index, which captures perspective taking, fantasy, empathic concern and personal distress.

Statistically, the team faced a technical challenge. Sexual aggression scores are count variables, skewed toward zero, with roughly sixty percent of participants reporting no aggressive acts at all. Ordinary linear regression would violate the distributional assumptions of such data. The researchers therefore employed latent negative binomial regression models within a structural equation modeling framework, comparing three nested models: one in which empathy’s effect was constrained to zero, one in which dominance/nurturance’s effect was constrained to zero, and one in which both were freely estimated. Latent modeling also sidestepped the notorious unreliability of difference scores, which the dominance-nurturance variable required.

The results were unambiguous. Across all three models, hostile masculinity and impersonal sexuality emerged as significant positive predictors of sexual aggression, confirming their status as the model’s core risk factors. Empathy, by contrast, acted as a significant negative predictor: men higher in empathy reported lower rates of sexually aggressive behavior. In the model combining all predictors, each unit increase in empathy reduced the expected rate of sexual aggression by roughly a third, while each unit increase in hostile masculinity multiplied the expected rate by about 1.46 and impersonal sexuality by 1.25. The dominance/nurturance difference score, however, contributed nothing, neither directly nor in interaction with the two risk factors.

Model fit statistics told the same story. The model containing empathy but excluding dominance/nurturance achieved the best fit according to the Akaike information criterion, the Bayesian information criterion and sample-size-adjusted variants. Because dominance/nurturance showed no effect to begin with, there was no effect for empathy to replace or explain away, despite a substantial negative correlation of minus 0.52 between empathy and the dominance/nurturance score. The authors conclude that whatever predictive value the dominance-nurturance dimension once appeared to hold was likely attributable to its overlap with empathy, and that future confluence model research should replace it with direct empathy measures.

One finding added an unexpected layer of nuance. Although the hostile masculinity by impersonal sexuality interaction failed to reach significance in the count regression models, complementary response surface analysis confirmed a synergistic effect. Using a shifted and rotated squared difference model, the analysis revealed that risk climbs steeply and nonlinearly when hostile masculinity is high, even when impersonal sexuality is only moderate. The interaction, in other words, is asymmetric and driven primarily by hostile masculinity. The authors caution that previous studies reporting interaction effects with ordinary linear regression may have overestimated them, and that appropriate count regression techniques may simply make interactions harder to detect, making the response surface approach a valuable complement.

Why does empathy matter so much? The authors suggest that when a man can take the perspective of a potential victim and imagine how coercive behavior would feel from her side, the behavior becomes less likely to be carried out, independently of his hostility toward women or his preference for uncommitted sex. The prevalence figures underline how rare protective combinations are. The high-risk profile of high hostile masculinity, high impersonal sexuality and low empathy appeared in only 5.7 percent of the sample, whereas the opposite profile combining all three risk traits with high empathy occurred in fewer than one percent of participants, a scarcity that may also explain why the three-way interaction just failed to reach statistical significance.

The practical implications reach into prevention. Interventions that merely attack hostile attitudes have often proven ineffective over time because the underlying traits are stable, and some programs may even provoke reactance and boomerang effects in high-risk men. Earlier work by Schewe and O’Donohue showed that programs targeting victim empathy can partially succeed in increasing empathic concern and reducing risk factors such as acceptance of interpersonal violence. The present findings strengthen the case for empathy-enhancing components in prevention programs aimed at high-risk men. At the same time, the open question of whether empathy operates as a moderator or as an independent protective factor has direct practical weight: if both pathways exist, different groups of aggressive men may require different interventions.

The study carries limitations that its authors freely acknowledge. The cross-sectional design rules out causal claims, and longitudinal work is needed to establish temporal ordering among the constructs. The sample, though spanning a broad adult age range, was restricted to heterosexual men and relatively small, and hostile masculinity was operationalized solely as hostility toward women rather than the full heterogeneous construct including sexual dominance. Replication in more diverse populations and with broader measures is essential. Nevertheless, the message is clear and consequential. Within the confluence model, hostile masculinity and impersonal sexuality remain the drivers of risk, dominance/nurturance should step aside, and empathy emerges as a measurable, modifiable protective factor that may be the most promising lever for reducing sexual aggression.

Subject of Research: The roles of empathy and dominance/nurturance in predicting male sexual aggression within the confluence model

Article Title: The Critical Role of Empathy Over Dominance/Nurturance in Predicting Sexual Aggression in the Confluence Model

Article References: The Critical Role of Empathy Over Dominance/Nurturance in Predicting Sexual Aggression in the Confluence Model. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03510-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03510-5

Keywords: confluence model, sexual aggression, empathy, hostile masculinity, impersonal sexuality, dominance/nurturance, Bem Sex-Role Inventory, negative binomial regression, response surface analysis, prevention programs, Critical, Role