Empathic responsiveness of children and adolescents with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder.
Kids with ASD can pass lab empathy tasks while still showing less real-world caring, so always pair observations with parent report.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched the kids with high-functioning autism and 26 typical kids. Ages ranged from 8 to 15. Each child saw short clips of people getting hurt or sad. The kids then told how the person felt and what they would do next.
Parents also filled out a form about how often their child shows care at home. The researchers compared the two groups on both lab answers and parent reports.
What they found
In the clinic tasks, both groups gave the same amount of empathic answers. Kids with ASD looked just as caring on paper.
But parents of kids with ASD ticked fewer real-life caring acts. The gap was biggest for kids who scored high on the ADOS. Observation said “fine”; parents said “not really.”
How this fits with other research
Fink et al. (2014) also found no emotion-recognition gap once verbal skill was held equal. Together these studies say lab measures can hide everyday problems.
Sherwell et al. (2014) tested adults with the same task and did find a deficit. The skill gap may widen with age, so early data can look rosy while later data look grim.
Payne et al. (2020) showed teens with ASD miss negative faces even when basic face seeing is okay. That fits the parent reports here: subtle emotion cues slip past the kids outside the lab.
Why it matters
Your clipboard can lie. A child may ace role-play empathy yet still shrug when a peer cries on the playground. Add parent or teacher questionnaires to every social-skills assessment. If ratings clash with your probe data, teach real-life spotting and showing of care, not just correct answers in your office.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Previous studies have shown reduced empathic responsiveness to others' emotions in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and an intellectual disability. However, age and intelligence may promote children's empathic responsiveness. Therefore, we examined the empathic responsiveness in normally intelligent school-aged children and adolescents with a clinical diagnosis of ASD (n = 151) and in a typically developing comparison group (n = 50), using structured observations and parent reports. Based on the observations, participants' responses to the emotional displays of an interviewer were surprisingly similar. However, compared with parents from the comparison group, parents of a child with ASD reported significantly fewer empathic responses, particularly when the child received a high score on the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule. Even though parents report a reduced empathic responsiveness in school-aged children and adolescents with ASD, it may be difficult to find these empathic limitations during brief observations in a structured setting.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2013 · doi:10.1002/aur.1299