Empathic disequilibrium in two different measures of empathy predicts autism traits in neurotypical population.
Ido Shalev, Florina Uzefovsky
PMID 32660537WHAT IT FOUND
A larger gap between feeling others' emotions and understanding them was associated with more autism traits in 671 college students.
People who felt more than they understood reported higher autism traits, but this was questionnaire-based and not a diagnosis.
Key findings
01A larger difference between emotional and cognitive empathy was associated with higher autism-trait scores in the main regression analyses.
02Participants whose emotional empathy was higher than their cognitive empathy had higher autism-trait scores than balanced-empathy participants in both empathy-questionnaire analyses.
03The emotional-empathy-dominant pattern was linked to more difficulty identifying and describing one's own emotions in the IRI analysis but not in the EQ analysis.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
All scores were self-report, so they reflect what participants said about their own empathy and autism traits rather than observed communication or diagnosed autism. The sample was college students in the general population; only five scored at or above the AQ clinical cut-off, so it cannot be read as evidence about diagnosed autism. Autism is more common in males, but females were over-represented in the sample (56% females), which complicates the sex pattern found for empathy dominance. The effect sizes were small to moderate. The IRI and EQ analyses did not agree on alexithymia results.
Declared interests
Funding came from the National Institute for Psychobiology in Israel, Arianne de Rothschild, the Interfaculty Brain Science school, and the Paedagogica Foundation. The supplied text does not include an author conflict-of-interest declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that empathy imbalance causes autism or can diagnose autism in patients. The study used self-report questionnaires in college students without diagnosed autism, and the effect sizes were small to moderate.