Autistic individuals might be somewhat better at reading emotions of other autistic people

A study comparing the abilities of autistic and non-autistic individuals to recognize other people’s emotions found no overall main differences between the two groups. However, autistic individuals were more accurate at reading the emotional valence of other autistic individuals. The paper was published in Molecular Autism.

Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s thoughts and feelings. It also includes the ability to respond emotionally in a way that reflects or fits what that person is experiencing. Researchers distinguish between cognitive empathy, which involves recognizing and understanding another person’s mental state, and affective empathy, which refers to emotionally responding to another person’s feelings.

Autism has traditionally been associated with difficulties in empathy, especially in understanding other people’s emotions, intentions, and social signals. More recent work, however, has challenged the idea that such difficulties can be explained solely by deficits within autistic individuals. One influential view is the double empathy problem hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that misunderstandings between autistic and non-autistic people are reciprocal rather than one-sided.

According to this view, autistic people find it difficult to understand non-autistic people, while non-autistic people likewise struggle to understand autistic people because the two groups tend to differ in how they experience and communicate about the world. Research has increasingly found that autistic people tend to report easier communication, stronger connection, and greater comfort when interacting with other autistic people. Likewise, non-autistic people can have more difficulty accurately interpreting the emotions and mental states of autistic individuals than those of other non-autistic people.

Study author Yonat Rum and colleagues conducted a study in which they tested the double empathy problem hypothesis. More specifically, they explored whether autistic and non-autistic individuals differ in their ability to empathize with autistic and non-autistic social targets. These authors hypothesized that non-autistic participants would better empathize with non-autistic social targets, while autistic participants would better empathize with autistic social targets. Empathizing, in this context, meant understanding another person’s feelings accurately.

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Study participants were 235 individuals recruited through the Cambridge Autism Research Database (CARD) and word of mouth. 141 of them were autistic. 125 were female. 74% were from English-speaking countries, most often from the UK. Autistic participants’ average age was 48 years, while it was 51 for non-autistic participants.

Study authors prepared an empathic accuracy task that consisted of videos of 5 autistic and 5 non-autistic adults telling autobiographical stories. These individuals reported how they felt while telling the story using a slider on a scale ranging from negative to positive (affective valence). They were continuously adjusting this slider while telling the story. The slider’s position was recorded every 0.5 seconds. After completing the story, these 10 storytellers rated the degree to which they felt 12 emotions (embarrassment, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, pride, fear, excitement, contentment, stress, calmness, and alertness) on a scale from 0 to 8.

In the course of the study, each participant watched 2 of these videos (randomly selected), one with an autistic storyteller and one with a non-autistic storyteller. They were not told the diagnosis of the storytellers. Participants provided the same ratings as the storytellers, and study authors assessed participants’ empathic accuracy by calculating how much participants’ ratings of a storyteller’s emotional state agreed with the storyteller’s own ratings. Aside from this, participants rated their own feeling of empathy and interest toward the storyteller.

Results showed that participants were somewhat accurate in determining whether a storyteller’s feelings were positive or negative. However, there were no main differences between autistic and non-autistic individuals in the overall accuracy of estimating the specific emotions of the storytellers in the videos. However, when tracking moment-to-moment emotional valence using the continuous slider, autistic individuals were significantly more accurate at tracking the emotions of autistic storytellers compared to non-autistic participants. This small-to-medium advantage suggests an own-group advantage for autistic individuals.

The two groups of participants were equally accurate when assessing non-autistic storytellers. Interestingly, non-autistic individuals rated their own empathy and interest in the storyteller as higher. Additionally, when providing free-text comments, autistic participants frequently described difficulties in identifying emotions and reflected on their own performance, whereas non-autistic participants mostly provided feedback on the task design. This led the researchers to suggest that autistic individuals may underestimate their own empathic abilities.

“Findings suggest partial support for the double empathy problem theory and potential underestimation of autistic participants of their own empathic abilities. Individual variability patterns caution against treating neurotypes as homogeneous categories that alone determine double empathy processes,” study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of autism. However, it should be noted that study participants rated pre-recorded videos, which is substantively different from assessing emotions during real-life social encounters. Authors also note that autistic participants in their study were volunteers i.e., self-selected, and may not adequately represent the full autism spectrum. The study sample likely did not include autistic individuals requiring greater support to engage in social interactions.

The paper, “Nuances of double empathy in autistic and non-autistic people: examination using the empathic accuracy paradigm,” was authored by Yonat Rum, Noa Feldman, Shir Genzer, Carrie Allison, Ofer Golan, Anat Perry, and Simon Baron-Cohen.