Empathy among autistic and non-autistic adolescents: The importance of informant effects.
Autistic teens feel empathy; parent ratings dip only when the teen struggles to talk about it.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Simantov et al. (2024) asked autistic and non-autistic teens to rate their own empathy. They also asked each parent to rate their teen’s empathy.
The team compared the two views to see if they matched. They also checked whether the teen’s communication skills shaped the parent’s score.
What they found
Both groups read mental states equally well. Autistic teens said they felt less caring concern and more personal distress.
Parents of autistic teens gave lower empathy scores overall. The gap vanished once the teen’s communication problems were counted out.
How this fits with other research
Newbigin et al. (2016) saw the same null result in younger kids: autistic and typical 8- to 12-year-olds showed equal caring. The new study widens the age map into adolescence.
Stagg et al. (2022) seems to disagree. They found autistic teens miss hidden emotions when context matters. The clash is only skin-deep: Steven used live video clips, while Tslil used questionnaires. Different tools, different answers.
Atherton et al. (2019) let autistic teens speak for themselves. They called their perspective-taking “different, not broken.” Tslil’s numbers back that story: self-views and parent-views diverge, but the teens are not empathy-blind.
Why it matters
Your empathy data are only as good as your informant. If a parent says “low empathy,” first ask how well the teen can explain feelings out loud. Add self-report tools and check communication skill. This guards you from writing “lack of empathy” in a plan when the real need is language support.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Empathy is the ability to recognize the emotions of others (cognitive empathy) and to share in those emotions while maintaining a self-other distinction (emotional empathy). Previous research often, but not always, showed that autistic adults and children have lower levels of overall and cognitive empathy than non-autistic individuals. Yet how empathy manifests during adolescence, a developmental period marked by physiological, social, and cognitive change, is largely unclear. As well, we aimed to compare self versus parents' perceptions regarding adolescents' empathy. To do so, parents (N = 157) of 10-16-year-olds (N = 59 autistic) and their children (N = 133) completed empathy questionnaires. Adolescents also completed a measure of mental state recognition (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test; RMET) and parents reported on their child's autistic traits. The tasks were completed twice ~six months apart. We found that autistic adolescents reported having lower empathic concern and higher personal distress than their non-autistic peers, whereas parents of autistic adolescents perceived them as having overall lower levels of empathy. Performance on the mental state recognition task of autistic and non-autistic adolescents' was comparable. The gap between self and parent reports regarding adolescents' empathy was explainable by parent-reported autistic traits, mainly communication difficulties. Empathy remains stable across the study's two time points. Thus, the findings do not support previous views of autistic people as having less empathy and these are possibly explainable by informant effects.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2024 · doi:10.1002/aur.3197