ArticleScientific reports2024
Impairment of affective and cognitive empathy in high functioning autism is mediated by alterations in emotional reactivity.
Article in Scientific reports, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Watching Together, Yet Feeling Apart: Interpersonal Neural Synchronization as a Marker of Symptom Severity in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder During Naturalistic Viewing.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Pupillometry and brain-wide c-Fos mapping uncover multimodal mirror emotional contagion related networks of mice.iScience · 2026Article
- Neural Heterogeneity Underlying Behavioral Equivalence: A Dynamic Neuro-Decoding Study of Cognitive and Affective Empathy in Relation to Autism-Like Traits.Brain and behavior · 2026Article
- Reduced categorical congruence of cognitive and affective empathy in persons with psychotic disorders.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Social perception and cognition in autism.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- 'Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Empathy impairments are considered a key aspect of autism-spectrum disorders (ASD). Previous research consistently shows reduced cognitive empathy, but findings on affective empathy vary, possibly due to experimental design variations (e.g., stimulus modality, social distance) and individual psychological factors (e.g., perceptual abilities, emotional reactivity). This study aims to clarify deficits in affective and cognitive empathy in ASD by addressing these contributing factors. Empathy was examined in 34 autistic individuals and 33 typically developed controls (TDCs) through the Textual Empathy Test (TET). The TET was developed to assess emotional responses when imagining oneself (emotional reactivity) as compared to a target person (friend, stranger) in emotional situations presented via short verbal descriptions. Participants rated emotional states of the target person (cognitive empathy) as well as their own emotional responses when imagining the target person in that situation (affective empathy). Ratings were interpreted relative to normative mean values through standardized regression coefficients. Results showed that high-functioning autism was associated with lower cognitive and affective empathy irrespective of social distance as well as with decreased emotional reactivity compared to controls. Moreover, emotional reactivity mediated the impact of ASD on both empathic components. In summary, altered emotional reactivity may underlie impaired empathy in autistic individuals.
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