Empathy and Autism: Establishing the Structure and Different Manifestations of Empathy in Autistic Individuals Using the Perth Empathy Scale.

Everyone completed the questionnaire online and self-reported their empathy, so people had to be able to read and understand the items. This excludes autistic people with lower literacy or cognitive skills, who may have a different empathic profile. The study did not verify anyone's autism diagnosis; it relied on participants reporting a diagnosis from a clinician. The two groups were not well matched: the autistic group was older and had fewer females, which the analysis tried to adjust for but may still have affected the results. Almost all participants were from Western countries, and gender-diverse people were excluded, so the findings may not generalise to other groups. Self-report measures capture how people think they empathise, which can differ from how they actually behave in empathy tasks.

Funded by the University of Western Australia. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Do not read the group averages as a description of any individual autistic client. Affective empathy varied much more within the autistic group than the non-autistic group, so some autistic people report high affective empathy and others low. The authors themselves say the average difference should be taken with caution for this reason.