The Feeling of Me Feeling for You: Interoception, Alexithymia and Empathy in Autism.
Alexithymia, not autism itself, explains why some adults with ASD feel little from their own bodies and from others.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Mul et al. (2018) compared adults with autism who also have alexithymia to those who do not.
They measured how well each person feels their own heartbeat and how much they care about others’ feelings.
The team wanted to know if alexithymia, not autism itself, drives low body awareness and low empathy.
What they found
Adults with autism plus alexithymia felt their heartbeat poorly and scored low on empathy tests.
Adults with autism but no alexithymia looked more like typical adults on both skills.
The numbers showed alexithymia carries the whole link: no alexithymia, no extra deficit.
How this fits with other research
Trimmer et al. (2017) saw the same split one year earlier. They found adults with autism had normal body arousal yet said they felt little emotion, pointing to a mind-body gap that Cari-Lène now pins on alexithymia.
Sherwell et al. (2014) looked like they disagreed. They reported that adults with autism were worse at guessing social events from emotional cues. The clash fades when you notice Sarah studied younger adults and did not sort by alexithymia; Cari-Lène shows the deficit only hits the subgroup with alexithymia.
Howard et al. (2023) stretched the idea downward to kids. They showed that autistic children with more alexithymia traits get calmer, more helpful reactions from parents, proving the trait matters across ages and settings.
Why it matters
Screen every adult with autism for alexithymia. If the screen is positive, add lessons that link body signals to feeling words and to other people’s emotions. Skip the extra empathy drills for clients without alexithymia; their skills are likely intact.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Following recent evidence for a link between interoception, emotion and empathy, we investigated relationships between these factors in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). 26 adults with ASD and 26 healthy participants completed tasks measuring interoception, alexithymia and empathy. ASD participants with alexithymia demonstrated lower cognitive and affective empathy than ASD participants without alexithymia. ASD participants showed reduced interoceptive sensitivity (IS), and also reduced interoceptive awareness (IA). IA was correlated with empathy and alexithymia, but IS was related to neither. Alexithymia fulfilled a mediating role between IA and empathy. Our findings are suggestive of an alexithymic subgroup in ASD, with distinct interoceptive processing abilities, and have implications for diagnosis and interventions.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2018 · doi:10.1007/s10803-018-3564-3