Li, Boya;
Blijd-Hoogewys, Els;
Stockmann, Lex;
Vergari, Ilaria;
Rieffe, Carolien;
(2022)
Toward feeling, understanding, and caring: The development of empathy in young autistic children.
Autism
10.1177/13623613221117955.
(In press).
Preview |
PDF
Li_etal_2022_empathy.pdf - Published Version Download (982kB) | Preview |
Abstract
LAY ABSTRACT: Empathy is a highly valued human capacity. Yet, autistic people are often portrayed as lacking in empathy. Recent research, which views empathy as a complex construct emerging from multiple interrelated emotional and cognitive processes, argues that, although many autistic people do have difficulty understanding others' emotions, and this may hinder them from responding to others in a prosocial manner, they are not indifferent to other people's feelings. Hoping to contribute to a better understanding of the unique challenges that autistic children face in their empathy development, we followed the development of four empathy abilities: emotion contagion, attention to others, emotion acknowledgment, and prosocial actions, in 1- to 6-year-old autistic children, in comparison with non-autistic children. Once a year, for 4 consecutive years, children's empathy abilities were evaluated by experimenters who acted out emotional episodes to provoke empathy in children, and by parents who filled out empathy questionnaires. We found that autistic children experienced indeed more difficulty attending to others, acknowledging others' emotions, and initiating prosocial actions toward others. However, according to parents, they did not differ from their non-autistic peers in feeling along with others' negative emotions. This indicates that it might not be the case that autistic children did not want to act empathetically toward others. Rather, they might not know how to do so. Notably, despite these difficulties, when looking at children's developmental trajectories, autistic children showed similar improvements over time as non-autistic children. This provides evidence that autistic children have the potential to learn and to improve their empathy skills.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Toward feeling, understanding, and caring: The development of empathy in young autistic children |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1177/13623613221117955 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613221117955 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
| Keywords: | attention, autism spectrum disorders, early childhood, emotion acknowledgment, emotion contagion, empathy development, longitudinal, prosocial action |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10154741 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
