Why People with Asperger’s Syndrome Lack Empathy

Aspies have a huge disconnect between thinking and feeling, or cognitive empathy (CE) and emotional empathy (EE). But what is the cause of this disconnect?

True empathy is the ability to be aware of one’s own feelings and thoughts at the same time you are aware of another person’s feelings and thoughts (or several other persons’). It means having the ability to speak about this awareness and creating mutual understanding and a sense of caring for one another.

According to the latest neuroscience research discussed in Simon Baron-Cohen’s book, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Evil, the cause is poorly working empathy circuits in the brain.

Each brain part in the empathy circuit is not so functional by itself but needs the other circuits to carry out the complex empathy task of really stepping into the shoes of another person.

• The medial prefrontal cortex compares your perspective to another person’s perspective.
• The dorsal medial prefrontal cortex helps you understand your own thoughts and feelings.
• The ventral medial prefrontal cortex stores information about how strongly you feel about a course of action.
• The inferior frontal gyrus helps with emotion recognition.
• The caudal anterior cingulate cortex is activated with pain, both when you feel yours and observe it in others.
• The anterior insula is involved in bodily self-awareness, something that is tied to empathy.
• The right temporoparietal junction helps you judge another person’s intentions and beliefs.
• The amygdala plays a central role in empathy because of its connection to fear, thereby cueing you to look at someone’s eyes to help you gather information about that person’s emotions and intentions. People with Asperger’s Syndrome avoid eye contact unless they are specifically instructed to look someone in the eye so a lot of information is lost.
• The mirror neuron system connects several parts of the brain. It responds when you engage in an action and when you observe others engage in an action. For example, these neurons fire when you gaze in a certain direction or observe another person gazing in the same direction (hence, “mirroring”). Your mirror neurons make you look in the same direction as the speaker, but you also need other empathy circuits to make meaning of why you are looking.

These are just a few regions of the brain’s empathy circuits. You can see that it’s a very complex system. If a single one of them doesn’t work, the whole network suffers, and so do our relationships.

“Will Aspies always be like this?” Researchers and clinicians aren’t sure. There are some promising therapies. So far we really have as little information on successful clinical interventions as we do on the genetic and neurological structure of the brain. The Aspie needs to recognize that he or she does indeed have zero degrees of empathy. And, the Aspie needs to stop expecting that his or her grasp of the facts should rule.

Reference

Baron-Cohen, Simon. (2011). The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Evil. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

Baron-Cohen suggests the cause of an Asperger’s sufferer’s lack of good social skills is poorly working empathy circuits in the brain.