Agent familiarity and emotional context influence the everyday empathic responding of young children with autism

Whereas research addressing empathy in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) tends to employ pencil-and-paper and laboratory-based behavioural methods, the current study is novel in eliciting parent-report data regarding everyday empathy, sampling various emotional situations regularly encountered by children. Parents of typically-developing children and children diagnosed with ASD and DS completed the newly-developed Day-to-Day Child Empathy Questionnaire. Analysis of descriptions of their children's responses to the various empathy-inducing situations supports the notion of an empathy deficit in ASD, confirming previous laboratory-based findings. However, important moderation effects were also demonstrated, for both control and clinical groups. In particular, parents reported children in all groups to be more likely to respond empathically to a familiar agent. The nature of children's responses also varied according to the specific emotional context.