ArticleJournal of autism and developmental disorders2025
Empathy and Autism: Establishing the Structure and Different Manifestations of Empathy in Autistic Individuals Using the Perth Empathy Scale.
Article in Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Scoping Review on Positive Emotions and Affect in Autism.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Measuring cognitive and affective empathy across positive and negative emotions: psychometric properties and measurement invariance of the Perth Empathy Scale.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
purposeThere is a common mischaracterisation that autistic individuals have reduced or absent empathy. Measurement issues may have influenced existing findings on the relationships between autism and empathy, and the structure of the empathy construct in autism remains unclear.
methodsThe present study sought to address these gaps by examining the structure and psychometric properties of the Perth Empathy Scale (PES) in autistic individuals (N = 239) compared to non-autistic individuals (N = 690).
resultsOur moderated non-linear factor analysis revealed that the multidimensional empathy construct manifested similarly in autistic and non-autistic individuals, with the PES displaying good validity and reliability. Moreover, the results revealed that autistic individuals reported reduced cognitive empathy and reduced affective empathy for positive and negative emotions. However, there was greater heterogeneity of empathic tendencies in the autistic sample, indicating that these mean differences may not be generalisable for all autistic individuals.
conclusionThe present study highlights that the PES is suitable for assessing empathy across autistic and non-autistic individuals. This work with the PES also provides greater nuance to our understanding of empathy and autism, and based on these findings, we propose the empathy heterogeneity hypothesis of autism as a new way of describing empathy in autism.
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