ASD vs Psychopathy regarding Empathy

I really like all the research Francesca Happe is doing at King's College on ASD, including researching the difference of psychopaths regarding empathy. In her video https://youtu.be/Sh1IsnwVQis  she uses the term "Mind Blindness" instead of issues with Empathy.

Some of it is echoed in this book: 

"Psychopaths are the opposite of autistic: they are good at telling what you are thinking and may use that to manipulate you, but don’t give a damn about your feelings. In autism, feeling empathy must also be distinguished from expressing empathy – the latter may prove challenging for some autistic people, especially if expected to act in narrowly defined, normative ways to show they care."

Link: https://dart.ed.ac.uk/autism-book/

Additional research:

"However, many different cognitive and affective processes may lead to unempathic behavior and the social processing profiles of individuals with high psychopathic vs. ASD traits are likely different. Whilst psychopathy appears characterized by problems with resonating with others’ emotions,"

Link: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/52141076/Dissecting_empathy_high_levels_of_psychopathic_and_autistic_traits_are_characterized_by_difficulties_in_different_social_information_processing_domains_GoldPub.pdf

There are publications everywhere. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17018169/

Parents
  • This looks really interesting. I'm 'meant to be' asleep so I'll have a look over properly tomorrow.

    Recently I've been looking at an area called the 'double empathy problem' which talks about how empathy involves both perceiving and responding to emotions in others, and that NTs and NDs may each perceive and respond to emotions in others in different ways to each other.

Reply
  • This looks really interesting. I'm 'meant to be' asleep so I'll have a look over properly tomorrow.

    Recently I've been looking at an area called the 'double empathy problem' which talks about how empathy involves both perceiving and responding to emotions in others, and that NTs and NDs may each perceive and respond to emotions in others in different ways to each other.

Children
No Data