Characterizing Empathy in Autism: Explicit and Implicit Perspectives

Abstract

Autism has long been considered an empathy related condition, yet empirical evidence supporting this claim has been inconclusive. While most cognitive empathy assessments suggest a decreased capacity for emotion recognition, understanding, and attribution, it is unclear whether this is a global effect or may vary with context, age, and emotional valence. Similarly, inconclusive emotional empathy findings incorporate both psychological and physiological assessments in different experimental contexts, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions. Thus, the goal of this project was to address these limitations by investigating multiple channels of empathy across a single sample of wide age range using the same task. The following studies address the multiplicity of empathy at the levels of brain and behavior in individuals with and without autism.

The first objective was to investigate self-reported levels of emotional and cognitive empathy in the context of positive and negative emotionally charged images of human facial expression using the Multifaceted Empathy Test-Juvenile (MET-J). The second objective was to investigate differences in spontaneous facial expression production (FEP) while completing the MET-J, using automated facial action coding. Separate K-means clustering analyses were applied in our autism and neurotypical (NT) samples to identify within diagnostic group differences in expressivity. This was accomplished under the theoretical framework that facial expression production is inherently variable and that failure to limit inter-individual variability can obscure group differences. Lastly, the investigation bridges brain and behavior by investigating resting state functional connectivity between brain regions implicated in empathy and their relation to empathy scores on the MET-J.

Our collective findings point to the importance of self-other distinction as an integral capacity for the experience of empathy. Specifically, our results of increased facial expressivity and lower emotion recognition accuracy in autism point to a potential compensatory mechanism to emotion recognition in autism. The autistic people in our sample may have relied on self-experienced emotion and sensory feedback from one’s own spontaneous facial expressions in response to others’ emotions to a greater degree than NT controls. If replicated, these counterintuitive findings could inform social skills intervention approaches.