Empathy among autistic and non-autistic adolescents: The importance of informant effects

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.