Autistic adults' perspectives on appropriate empathic responses to others' emotions.
Autistic adults largely know what empathic responses are appropriate; they just feel less confident—target confidence, not basic skill deficits.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Brewer et al. (2023) asked autistic and non-autistic adults to write what they would say to a friend who felt sad, angry, or scared.
The team counted how many responses matched the kind, helpful things most people say. They also asked, "How sure are you that your answer is right?"
What they found
Autistic adults gave slightly fewer "typical" kind replies, but the groups mostly overlapped. The big gap was confidence: autistic adults felt far less sure their answers were correct.
In plain words, they knew what to say; they just doubted themselves.
How this fits with other research
Older studies using the Empathy Quotient saw huge deficits. Baron-Cohen et al. (2004) and Wakabayashi et al. (2007) painted autistic adults as markedly low in empathy. Neil’s open-ended task now shows the gap is small, updating those older scores.
Rogers et al. (2007) already found cognitive empathy lagged while emotional concern stayed strong. Neil’s results line up: knowledge lags slightly, but caring is intact.
Sheppard et al. (2016) showed neurotypicals misread autistic faces, creating a two-way street of misunderstanding. Neil adds that autistic-generated responses are largely on target, further shifting blame away from a one-sided "deficit."
Why it matters
When a client seems "unempathic," question their confidence, not their ability. Build fluency with practice and praise, not rote social-skills drills. Try letting the client hear their own kind response read aloud, then ask how sure they feel. Boosting self-certainty may do more than teaching content they already know.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Although the ability of autistic adults to recognize others' emotions has been extensively studied, less attention has been given to how they respond to these emotions. We examined two aspects of autistic and non-autistic adults' responsiveness to the emotional expressions of non-autistic actors: their perspectives on the appropriate way of responding to others' emotions and their awareness of others' perceptions of the likely appropriateness of such responses. Autistic (N = 63) and non-autistic (N = 67) adult samples viewed videos of 74 dyadic social interactions displaying different examples of 12 emotions expressed by one actor in response to the behavior of the other. After each video, participants (a) nominated the emotion expressed by the first actor, (b) offered their perspective on what would constitute an appropriate empathic response by the second actor, and (c) indicated their confidence in that response. Although the autistic group provided fewer appropriate empathic responses-operationalized via a panel's interpretations of normative responses-than the non-autistic group, within-group variability was marked, and the effect was weak and largely confined to basic emotions. Autistic individuals were, however, considerably less confident in their responses. Examination of the relationships between confidence in and the appropriateness of empathic responses provided no indication in either group of reliable discrimination of appropriate from inappropriate empathic responses or finely tuned metacognitive awareness of variations in appropriateness. In sum, autistic adults' perspectives on the appropriate empathic reactions to non-autistic adults' emotions were not unilaterally or markedly different to those of non-autistic adults.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023 · doi:10.1002/aur.2965