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There has been a widely held belief that people with autism spectrum disorders lack empathy. This article examines the empathy imbalance hypothesis (EIH) of autism. According to this account, people with autism have a deficit of cognitive empathy but a surfeit of emotional empathy. The behavioral characteristics of autism might be generated by this imbalance and a susceptibility to empathic overarousal. The EIH builds on the theory of mind account and provides an alternative to the extreme-male-brain theory of autism. Empathy surfeit is a recurrent theme in autistic narratives, and empirical evidence for the EIH is growing. A modification of the pictorial emotional Stroop paradigm could facilitate an experimental test of the EIH.
Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder that continues to fascinate researchers, challenge clinicians, and distress affected families. Empathy is a set of processes and outcomes at the heart of human social behavior. Fascination with autism is often interwoven with the study of empathy because prevailing theory suggests that people with autism lack empathy. For example, according to Decety and Jackson (2004), "Children with autism . . . display a broad range of social communication deficits, and most scholars agree that a lack of empathy prominently figures amongst them" (p. 90). The empathy imbalance hypothesis (EIH) of autism, in keeping with the theory of mind hypothesis (Baron-Cohen, 1995), proposes that autism involves a significant cognitive empathy (CE) deficit. However, the hypothesis also proposes, in contrast to prevailing theory, that people with autism actually have a heightened capacity for basic emotional empathy (EE). This combination of a CE deficit and an EE surfeit can be termed EE-dominated empathie imbalance.
The purpose of this article is to refine and expand the EIH of autism. To do this, I first tackle some definitional issues and describe the origin of the hypothesis. I then argue that the EIH may help account for many psychological features of autism. Evidence for the EIH will include the following: (a) Children with autism show more facial affect than typically developing children in an empathy paradigm study, (b) the faces of adults with autism show heightened electromyographic responsiveness to other people's expressions of happiness and fear, (c) children with autism show appropriate electrodermal responses to images of distressed people and sometimes...