Indrajeet Patil's research shows people with autism also have their share of empathy for others’ well being, contrary to common beliefs. In fact, they are believed to go through a lot of personal distress at the prospect of anyone being harmed.
PatientsEngage with inputs from Akila Vaidyanathan interviewed SISSA researcher Indrajeet Patil on his research:
Can you tell us about the study in brief.
Traditionally, there have been two common myths about autism that have flourished in the society:
- Autistic people lack empathic concern for others' well-being.
- They are more likely to harm others because of such putative deficits.
In this study, we investigated both of these claims using a moral judgment task that asked autistic adults to report their approval of harmful behaviour carried out for maximising the overall welfare (e.g. killing one persona to save five other people for getting killed). What we find is that they are no more likely to endorse such harmful behaviour than their healthy counterparts.
Is the study in effect showing that the autistic population follows a similar pattern as the general population with regard to empathy - in fact, that they are more likely to take decisions in order to not harm others?
Because the autistic and alexithymic traits overlap so much, it is difficult to separate their respective contributions to moral judgments. Thus, we used special statistical techniques to separate their influence and found that:
- Autistic traits are associated with reduced tendency to harm others because of a component of empathy called personal distress, which tracks how distressing it is for you to be involved in socially stressful situations. It can be taken to mean that, when faced which scenarios as stressful as moral dilemmas, they tend to withdraw from the situation;
- On the other hand, the other personality trait in this condition, alexithymia, was associated with reduced empathic concern and increased likelihood to endorse the harmful solution.
Thus, basically, these two traits cancel out each other's influence and moral judgments of autistic people are indistinguishable from those of healthy controls.
What could be the cause for higher alexithymia in the autistic population -50% !!-- what is the incidence of alexithymia in the general population?
Medical Definition of alexithymia: inability to identify and express or describe one's feelings. People with alexithymia typically display a lack of imaginative thought, have difficulty distinguishing between emotions and bodily sensations, and engage in logical externally oriented thought
That's a million dollar question! We currently do not have a good understanding of the kind of genetic or environmental factors that contribute to these traits and so this is a work in progress. It's not just autism, but there are many other conditions which show such high preponderance of alexithymia (e.g., multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, etc.)
Does “mind-blindness” contribute to the lack of empathy or the lack of the understanding of emotions of self and others?
At this point it's unclear if difficulty in understanding what other people are thinking, what they believe or desire, etc. (known as theory of mind) has implications for understanding what they are feeling. Traditionally, theory of mind and empathy are treated as two separate cognitive abilities.
Are we saying that autistic individuals do not really want to cause harm to others but are “acting out” in ways they hurt others or seem to not understand other’s needs and feelings because of being “stressed” out themselves?
There is not a lot of work on this topic, but my guess is that this has to do with deficits in emotion regulation.
One important aspect of emotional processing is regulating one’s emotions to adapt to different contexts. But individuals with ASD are known to have uncontrollable and problematic emotional responses, such as tantrums, temper outbursts, self-harm behaviour, etc. and this emotion dysregulation is related to core features of the disorder. Autistics make less frequent and less effective use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies by relying more on suppression (inhibiting emotion-expressive behaviour) and less on reappraisal (by creating a narrative that down-regulates impact of negative emotions) as compared to controls and this emotion regulation profile is maladaptive in the long term.
Are the challenging behaviours in autism a stress reaction?
Most likely yes. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence how social situations can be inherently demanding for autistic individuals, let alone a highly emotionally charged situation like moral dilemma which involve extreme harm.
When can we expect the tool for differentiating between alexithymia and autism to come out?
We already have self-report questionnaires (alexithymia: Toronto Alexithymia Scale; autism: Autism Quotient) which have proved to be exceptionally useful in assessing severity of these two traits.
What are the next steps?
The moral dilemma task has been criticised to have contexts that are too contrived and extreme to provide any cues about social behaviour in everyday life-like situations. Thus, in future studies, we would like to explore the role of alexithymia in reduced prosocial sentiments in autism using a more ecologically valid paradigm that does not involve such extreme settings but more mundane daily situations (e.g., giving up your seat for an elderly lady on the bus).
Any message to the community?
The most important takeaway message for the readers would be that autistics do not lack empathic concern for others, as is usually assumed. They sometimes seem to exhibit lack of such concern because of the unrecognised part of their personality, namely alexithymia, that is associated with such reduced empathic response. In fact, autistic traits are associated with *greater* personal distress when they encounter others' suffering and, accordingly, exhibit increased unease in moral situations involving harm.
About Indrajeet Patil
After studying Physics for my university studies (B.Sc. and M.Sc.), Indrajeet finished my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at SISSA (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati), Trieste, Italy, where he is also currently a Visiting Researcher (Adviser: Giorgia Silani). He will be starting his post-doctoral research with Fiery Cushman and Mina Cikara at Harvard University from January 2017. His area of research is moral psychology. In particular, he is interested in understanding neural and psychological processes at work while people make moral decisions in morally conflictual situations (conflict between welfare of few against many, conflict between innocent intention and harmful outcome, etc.
Research reference
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160329101041.htm
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep23637
