Journal article
Dissecting empathy: high levels of psychopathic and autistic traits are characterized by difficulties in different social information processing domains
- Abstract:
- Individuals with psychopathy or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can behave in ways that suggest lack of empathy towards others. 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, ASD appears characterized by problems with cognitive perspective-taking. In addition, alexithymia has previously been associated with both disorders, but the contribution of alexithymia needs further exploration. In a community sample (N = 110) we show for the first time that although affective resonance and cognitive perspective-taking are related, high psychopathic traits relate to problems with resonating with others’ emotions, but not cognitive perspective taking. Conversely, high ASD traits relate to problems with cognitive perspective-taking but not resonating with others’ emotions. Alexithymia was associated with problems with affective resonance independently of psychopathic traits, suggesting that different component processes (reduced tendency to feel what others feel and reduced ability to identify and describe feelings) comprise affective resonance. Alexithymia was not associated with the reduced cognitive perspective-taking in high ASD traits. Our data suggest that (1) elevated psychopathic and ASD traits are characterized by difficulties in different social information processing domains and (2) reduced affective resonance in individuals with elevated psychopathic traits and the reduced cognitive perspective taking in individuals with elevated ASD traits are not explained by co-occurring alexithymia. (3) Alexithymia is independently associated with reduced affective resonance. Consequently, our data point to different component processes within the construct of empathy that are suggestive of partially separable cognitive and neural systems.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 291.2KB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00760
Authors
- Publisher:
- Frontiers Media
- Journal:
- Frontiers in Human Neuroscience More from this journal
- Volume:
- 7
- Article number:
- 760
- Publication date:
- 2013-11-13
- Acceptance date:
- 2013-10-22
- DOI:
- ISSN:
-
1662-5161
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- UUID:
-
uuid:d9de6d8c-f8cb-4886-b2fb-beaac005d31f
- Deposit date:
-
2015-11-05
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Lockwood et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2013
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2013 Lockwood, Bird, Bridge and Viding. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record