Brett Jack D, Preece David A, Becerra Rodrigo, Whitehouse Andrew, Maybery Murray T
The University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.
School of Psychology, Curtin University, Perth, Australia.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2024 Aug 8. doi: 10.1007/s10803-024-06491-3.
There 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.
The 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).
Our 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.
The 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.
有一种常见的错误认知，即自闭症患者的同理心减弱或缺乏。测量问题可能影响了关于自闭症与同理心之间关系的现有研究结果，并且自闭症中同理心结构仍不明确。
本研究旨在通过检验自闭症个体（N = 239）与非自闭症个体（N = 690）中珀斯同理心量表（PES）的结构和心理测量特性来填补这些空白。
我们的调节非线性因子分析表明，多维同理心结构在自闭症个体和非自闭症个体中表现相似，PES显示出良好的效度和信度。此外，结果显示自闭症个体报告的认知同理心以及对积极和消极情绪的情感同理心均有所降低。然而，自闭症样本中同理心倾向的异质性更大，这表明这些均值差异可能并非适用于所有自闭症个体。
本研究强调PES适用于评估自闭症个体和非自闭症个体的同理心。这项关于PES的研究也为我们对同理心和自闭症的理解提供了更细微的差别，基于这些发现，我们提出自闭症的同理心异质性假说，作为描述自闭症中同理心的一种新方式。
