Do you feel me? Autism, empathic accuracy and the double empathy problem.

The study only tested one side of the double empathy problem: non-autistic people understanding autistic people. It did not include diagnosed autistic participants, so we do not know if autistic people struggle to understand non-autistic narrators. Participants were not screened for autistic diagnoses; they were assumed to be non-autistic based on mean AQ scores below the clinical cut-off. The narrators were all White, highly educated, and from stable socioeconomic backgrounds, which limits generalizability to other cultural and social groups. Individual differences such as alexithymia (difficulty identifying and describing emotions), which co-occurs in 50% of autistic people, were not measured or controlled for. The CogEmp and AffEmp tasks used only six emotion options, which may have allowed for guessing or social desirability bias.

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The study received no financial support.

Do not conclude that autistic people are less empathic or that their emotions are 'harder to read' because they are expressive. The study shows a mismatch in interpretation styles. Furthermore, do not assume that having high autistic traits (High-AQ) in a clinician improves their ability to understand autistic patients, as the High-AQ group actually showed lower empathy scores overall.