Abstract
Although lack of empathy has been considered a central characteristics of Asperger syndrome, quantitative and qualitative assessments of empathy in this syndrome are lacking. We present two cases of adolescents with Asperger syndrome who show extreme deficits on measures of both cognitive and affective empathy. Analysis of their performance on tasks assessing cognitive and affective processing did not reveal significant impairment in executive functions, nor in their ability to recognize emotions or the ability to create a mental representation of another person's knowledge. However, both patients were unable to integrate the emotional content with mental representations and deduce the other person's emotional state. These results suggest that impaired empathy in individuals with Asperger syndrome may be due to impaired integration of the cognitive and affective facets of the other person's mental state.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 245-252 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Neurocase |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2002 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We are grateful to Valerie Stone for providing the faux pas stories, and to Margo Lapidot, for the Hebrew version of the prosody test and for the irony test. S. G. Shamay was supported by a doctoral research grant from the Israel Foundation Trustees.
Keywords
- Asperger syndrome
- Empathy
- Theory of mind
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
- Clinical Neurology