Understanding or Feeling: Exploring Different Types of Empathy in Boys with Autism and Conduct Disorder

Abstract

Problems with empathy have been suggested to be one source of social difficulties in children with autism spectrum disorders and children with conduct disorder. Empathy has been proposed to be made up of cognitive and emotional components. This proposal investigates cognitive and emotional empathy deficits and their differing manifestations in children with autism spectrum disorder and children with conduct disorder. Sixty boys with autism, 60 boys with conduct disorder and callous-unemotional traits, 60 boys with only conduct disorder, and 60 controls will be compared. Using a median split based on age, the participants will also be sorted by age, being placed into either a younger age group or an older group. Four tasks will be used to measure emotion recognition skills, perspective taking, emotional arousal, and emotional contagion. A 4 (group) X 2 (age) MANOVA will be used to analyze the results. Boys with callous-unemotional traits are expected to display emotion-specific cognitive empathy deficits, as well as deficits in self-reported and physiologically measured levels of emotional empathy. Boys with autism are expected to display global cognitive empathy deficits. Boys with autism and boys with only conduct disorder are expected to show lower levels of self-reported emotional empathy but display typical physiological emotional empathy responses.