中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often perceived as lacking empathy. Recently some researchers and practitioners have questioned this stereotype and argued that despite their difficulty empathizing with others, individuals with ASD do not lack empathy. However, few studies have been conducted to address this issue. This study explores the empathy experiences and perspective of a high-functioning female adult with ASD (HFASD). Methods: From April to December 2013, using a qualitative approach we conducted 4 individual in-depth interviews and 5 focus group interviews to explore the empathy experiences of a 21 year-old female with HFASD. In the focus group there were 4 HFASD adults (1 female, 3 males), the researcher (as group facilitator), and a clinical psychologist (as co-facilitator). After each individual and group session, the researcher and the participant wrote down their reflections and feedback about the session until the HFASD female’s empathy experiences could be comprehensively understood. Data analysis included verbatim transcription, organizing text, text analysis, and visual presentation of integrated data. Results: The HFASD female’s experiences about and perspective of empathy were as follows: (1) Her understanding of empathy: Empathy is a process of understanding the rationale behind other people’s emotional reactions and finding the solutions that are mutually recognized. And this process is learned through cumulatively collecting data from past experience of interpersonal interactions and internet information to establish many logical databases for her own use. (2) Her difficulty empathizing with others: Included her lack of willingness, idiosyncratic thinking, delayed or confused perception of emotion, and not knowing how to respond appropriately. (3) Factors that influenced her empathetic performance included (a) facilitating factors: familiarity with the person with whom she needed to empathize, salience of the other’s emotions, similarity of past experience, receiving instructions about adequate empathic reactions; and (b) hindering factors: insufficient information, blunt affect, complicated emotions, lack of similar experience, interacting with more than 2 people at the same time. Conclusion: (1) The HFASD female adult depends more on cognitive empathy than emotional empathy. (2) Cognitive empathy is affected by the ASD person’s idiosyncratic way of thinking. (3) Emotional empathy may be affected by multiple factors, such as deficient emotional perception, willingness, similarity of experiences, etc. (4) Willingness plays an important role in the empathetic performance of ASD adults. (5) Empathy involves data-processing, which is different from processing emerging experiences. (6) There are differences in mechanism of perceiving empathy or reacting empathetically between HFASD adults and neurotypical adults.